alt Hacker NewsCancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
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> Cancer is not one thing,
I know this is a popular "well actually" to do, but it is not always useful in a conversation. Yes, all cancers are different, but yes, cancer is also one thing: unchecked, harmful division of cells.
Bacteria are also all different, but still they are "one thing", and despite their diversity, antibiotics exist that can deal with many species of them at once. It is reasonable to talk about bacteria and antibacterial medications, it is also reasonable to talk about cancer and cancer treatment. I truly hope cancer will meet its "penicillin" one day (yes I know this is unlikely).
The trials are not speedy enough. It’s all too slow.
Government should legislate a way to give sentenced for life inmates a proposition: you get just 25 years of sentence but you must sign up for super early drug tests and other experiments.
This would accelerate whole field of medicine ten fold and some ppl could also have a chance to see life outside prison as token of gratitude for their service. Win-win
That was a really good summary, thank you.
The golden panacea for this would be a gene editing mechanism that will work in every cell in the body. Once we have something we can do whole hog gene replacement, most human health problems would be solved forever.
>a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for,
Can you help disambiguate this? Are there treatments now, or are there potential treatments with trials in 1-5 years?