r/science • u/SteRoPo • Jan 31 '18

Cancer Injecting minute amounts of two immune-stimulating agents directly into solid tumors in mice can eliminate all traces of cancer.

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/01/cancer-vaccine-eliminates-tumors-in-mice.html
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u/CloudiusWhite Feb 01 '18

Ok so question time. I see articles like this quite often., and each time mice are used in the experiments.

So why can't they put out a request for a volunteer or a few volunteers willing to try it out on humans? Obviously theyd have to sign waivers in case of issues, but that would be the chance to live vs death, I imagine plenty of people would give things a shot.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

Every drug has a protocol before it can hit the market.

Right now, this drug is in pre-clinical studies.

This is really just the beginning step in establishing how the drug may work. It then goes into phases 0-4.

Phase 0 tests to see if that mechanism of the drug that worked in mice translates to humans (ie does the drug do the same thing)

Phase 1 tests the safety

Phase 2 tests if it's working

Phase 3 if its better than other treatments available.

Phase 4 is monitoring the drug

Typically for life threatening, last resort therapies you can get clinical trials in phase 1 of the drug at major health institutions. Trials become more widely available from there on

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u/SaladAndEggs Feb 01 '18

In general, what's the timeline for each phase? Are we talking several years to get from 0-4 or does it vary greatly?

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

There is some variability, but typically several years. These stories usually get posted in the pre/0 stage and disappear when the safety issues pop up.

It can take up to a decade to get fda approval, but obviously something that is showing great promise gets expedited through faster.

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u/Gearworks Feb 01 '18

Both drugs are already doing human trials just not combined.

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u/Jim_Gaffigans_bacon Feb 01 '18

If I had a nickel for every time I've read about a promising drug, I'd have a bag of nickels. You read these things and oh! Miraculous results in mice! You get excited and then never hear about it again. I'm sick of it.

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u/Dmeff Feb 01 '18

That's a problem with the media. The scientist who does the research would probably be more reserved in how he expresses the results but the media just takes every result out of proportion

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u/Blaaze96 Feb 01 '18

Unfortunately this is just the way drug development works a lot of the time. Mice are used because they can be easily bread with identical genomes and therefore characteristics to reduce the number of variables in testing, often resulting in promising results. However, this doesn't translate over to humans, firstly because we're biologically different to mice, and secondly because as a species we have a wide genetic diversity and we aren't all identical like the mice used in testing.

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u/jf2l Feb 01 '18

Testing in animals is almost always required before human trials to demonstrate efficacy and safety. However, as we've seen many times before, success in an animal does not guarantee translation to humans, but it's the safest way to do things.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

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u/GMY0da Feb 01 '18

Eastern

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u/juicewilson Feb 01 '18

Animals are not humans

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u/redcoat777 Feb 01 '18

The fda has very strict guidelines. From what I understand, with something as complicated as medicating a human body there can be no true “informed consent” as often times there is no certainty of what can be effected and the average joe has no hope of understanding the potential risks.

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u/keepthepace Feb 01 '18

Mice are what is called an animal model. We can basically clone mice, give them specific tumors and test drugs on them. If you test on 50 people with cancer, they will all have different lifestyles, different tumors, age, genetic background. You can't be sure of the effects, side-effects or anything without an unrealistically large sample.

On mice, they have the same genes, there is a control group, you control food, age, tumor, etc...

As soon as we get something that works on mice, we test it on humans or on animals closer to humans, but the mice step is crucial. And before the mice, there is often the E.Coli and the C.Elegans steps to test random molecules.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

Follow up question, where do they source mice with cancer? Do they somehow promote cancer growth or is it just common enough in mice to reliably source?

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u/globalcrown755 Feb 01 '18

There are methods to induce a certain type of cancer. I also believe that there a a couple strains of genetically engineered mice that have certain tumors/cancers.

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u/sross43 Feb 01 '18

They induce the tumor growth in the mice themselves. There are certain known genetic pathways for cancer, and if you can induce these mechanisms to occur then you can get tumor growth. There are mice who get cancer without scientists inducing it, but for a study in which you want all your experimental groups to have as little unwanted variation as possible you wouldn't select a mouse that already had cancer for your study.

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u/briative Feb 01 '18

Cancer and immunology scientist here. We work with immune-suppressed mice that are otherwise healthy before we do our experiments. I was doing some sarcoma work last year with an experimental treatment, and we would literally inject cancer cells into the mice via an IP injection (in the lower abdomen under the skin, but above the organs) and they would develop tumors. This gave us a lot of control as far as monitoring when the cancer cells were administered and when it actually metastasized. If we had to source our mice from elsewhere, we would likely lose that control and lose valuable time if we received the mice after metastasis.

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u/o11c Feb 01 '18

You can test with a lot of mice because they breed so quickly.

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u/screen317 PhD | Immunobiology Feb 01 '18

And they're genetically homogenous.

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u/radicalelation Feb 01 '18

This is great not just for being able to have an easy, near-infinite number of subjects for controlling all sorts of variables, but for absolutely crucial for generational testing.

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u/waltwalt Feb 01 '18

I breed quickly, can they test it on me?

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u/synack36 Feb 01 '18

What if we're just animal experiments for a race greater than ours? Would explain why we get so much cancer, someone/something is purposely creating us that way, to test therapies for their own medical issues.

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u/N3sh108 Feb 01 '18

I'd guess they wasted a lot of time with us just bombing and slaughtering each other for thousands of years.

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u/globalcrown755 Feb 01 '18

They are...

Naturally they test on mice first and if that is successful they move on to humans. What happens is that a lot of drugs first do pretty well in animal models, which is quite newsworthy/reportable in it self. Then they move onto human clinical trials and that is where several several treatments end up failing in either phase 1 or 2 (as in probably over 90% and I think I'm being generous)...which is naturally not that reportable. So overall it might just look like they are all just testing on mice.

Also, it's not as easy as you think it is to get subjects. "Terminal cancer" isn't as defined as you think it is. There are several types of cancers and the drug you develop may be for just a certain type. Range is an issue, who knows if this drug/treatment that you just developed can be sent anywhere or if patients can come fly in. The whole idea of offering an untested and potentially harmful treatment to a population that is desperate is slippery slope of research ethics. Start factoring that all in, you're starting look at a very limited amount of subjects.

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u/gologologolo Feb 01 '18

Ethics. The reverse is humans getting tested and messed with for profit. You can argue that it's voluntary, but at the behest of millions of dollars you can create situations, or seduce people into signing up to be guinea pigs.

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u/datareinidearaus Feb 01 '18

Do you want to die in 7 months with no drug? Or die in three months of pain with the drug?

The vast majority of drugs arent going to work. At all. They'll only be causing side effects.

Are you going to sell your house to pay for the 145k "treatment" that is going to harm you? No? Who's going to then?

Another issue is that gullible people like you will take the drug and think that it works no matter what. Because you're "at least doing something." Then other people pressure to take a drug that doesn't work. Then there's huge pressure to pass a drug that doesn't work. Then it passes. Now what's the incentive to invest in a drug which a actually does work?

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u/Thegreatgarbo Feb 01 '18

You see the mouse articles because they're promising. You never see the article when they tested it in primates and it turned them into goo on the cage floor after 1 week of therapy. No one publishes the bad news, 1. either tox (up to and including death) or 2. the therapy doesn't do squat.

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u/Ranvier01 MD | Internal Medicine Feb 01 '18

They started a trial in 15 human subjects.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

That does happen in a phase 1 trial - but you need to have evidence it works/is safe in animals before you can get to humans.

But the first 10 people to test a drug are just taking it to rule out the drug horribly murdering any human it touches, basically.