alt Hacker News> The results demonstrated the therapy not only reduced tumour size but also entirely stopped tumour growth with no evidence of tumour resistance for more than 200 days after treatment.
More details in https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2523039122/suppl... See page 25
In mice, N=12.
1 survived 200 days without cancer and was euthanized for 'ocular ulcers'.
5 survived 50-150 days, without cancer but were euthanized for other health problems
6 survived 50-150 days, and still had a smaller tumor and were euthanized for other health problems
My take away: Interesting, but the press article is overselling the result by a lot.
Edit: Fixed link.
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Apparently 50 mice days is equivalent to about 5 human years, so even if these other causes of death here directly caused by the treatment (not alleged), surviving this much longer (5-20 years) would be pretty incredible for humans.
Mice are very short-lived compared to us. In humans, the usual standard of judgment when it comes to cancer is "5 year survival". No mouse has ever lived for 5 years yet, that would be like 180 years for us.
Prolonging a mouse's life by a few months is non-trivial and hints (only hints) at potential efficiency of such treatment in other species as well.
So: half (1+5) of them made it at least 50 days without cancer, and the other half made it at least 50 days with a smaller tumor? This sounds excellent to me. I agree that the sentence you quoted is overselling, though.