Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer

Why? Seriously, think about it. Most people with pancreatic cancer have nothing to lose and many of them have just weeks or months to live.

Daraxonrasib, Afatinib, and SD36 are molecules that can already be purchased in bulk, and what's the worst that can happen?

Our society's morbid, irrational fear of quack medicine causes orders of magnitude more deaths through therapeutic neglect than it prevents through safety screening. "Better 10,000 die of cancer than 1 person die of fraud/waste/mismanagement or even in failed experiments performed in good faith."

https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...

(mostly a joke, but I'd be in favor of adding context to the HN headline if possible)

I looked at a clip of a man just a few years my senior where he was describing the symptoms that in his view should have made him go see a doctor earlier, because maybe then his pancreatic cancer wouldn't have been fatal.

Truth be told they wouldn't raise any red flags if I had them.

Only thing that I'm doing differently is having blood tests done on an annual basis, but those only show anything when e.g. the cancer has spread to the liver, which is typically too late anyway. It's an incredibly insidious disease, and if the tumor is growing on the wrong end of the organ, it won't give any symptoms whatsoever.

"Why don't I see these treatments hitting the general public?" Because trials like these are phase I/II. Then you need a phase III that takes a long time to recruit a large cohort and has overall survival as an end point so you need a long time to measure the actual outcome you care about. And most trials fail in phase III because the surrogate end points used in phase II studies, like progression free survival (ie how long did patients go before their disease advanced in screens), are not necessarily great predictors of improved overall survival.

Specifically for cancer vaccines, this paper was a driving force behind MSK establishing a cancer vaccine center to scale up these personalized neoantigen mRNA vaccines. It's very very difficult to do and extremely expensive right now.

The research at treating mouse cancer has been making great strides--people cancer still has a long way to go though.

Ugh, of course: "in mice"!

> The combination therapy also led to significant regression in genetically engineered mouse tumours and in human cancer tissues grown in lab mice, known as patient-derived tumour xenografts (PDX).

OK, maybe "in human tissue grown in mice" isn't so bad.

Fingers crossed. Pancreatic cancer is terrible.

"Here we describe peptides secreted as part of the Diglett evolution process, that have been found to disrupt oncocyte metabolism in vitro..."

Spanish researcher from Madrid. Hired by US on a grant. Worked hard and became director of the Oncology department on the NCI on Maryland. Somebody on the Spanish government decided to bet strong on him and recover it for Spanish Cancer research. A specific customised job offer was created for him. Politicians came and go; some are sensitive about science, other not so much. Some promises were never fulfilled, and he was about to quit and migrate again until private companies stepped on the scene with the resources needed and the will to allocate those resources. Money well spent, that was about to never find his target.

Nobel prizes were created exactly for this kind of humble, serious, zero-nonsense, zero-drama, all-work scientists.

The question here is: how much "Barbacids" quit US in the last year? Scientists aren't stupid. Everybody is aware that Barbacid in US today would have being harassed just for speaking Spanish and having a scarred face. All points that US is bleeding talent at a level never seen in their history.

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.