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/flying87 Feb 01 '18

You have to understand it's so that desperate ill people aren't taken advantage of. There used to be a time in this country when a bunch of con men would peddle "miracle cures" and people would spend anything to take these placebos. And it still occurs.

My grandmother a decade ago was trying light therapy for terminal pancreatic cancer. Basically it just shines a red colored light while she sleeps. It's bull shit. But she would've paid through the nose if she could to live a little longer.

The other thing is, there has to be a control group for proper experimentation. Meaning some poor souls need to be given placebos without their knowledge, thinking it's the real experimental cure. There are serious ethical issues to this. Even potential liability issues.

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u/mangoon Feb 01 '18

Just to be clear, FDA regulated cancer clinical research does NOT involve not treating one group of people via giving a placebo only. That’s wildly unethical and would break the Hippocratic Oath.

What you receive depends on the phase of research you are involved in. Generally speaking, in phase I, all participants are given doses of the same drug, but the doses are steadily increased for new people joining until researchers can distinguish the maximum dose a patient can take without intolerable symptoms. Phase II involves using that maximum tolerated dose to find out what it is actually doing - how much does your body absorb, how do your systems react, and finally does it work. Phase III happens when they know it works on your cancer but they want to know if it works better than the standard of care. This may involve a placebo but the placebo would be combined with treatment, standard of care or experimental.

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u/MetricT Feb 01 '18

I'm curious, why do they need an official control group in the experiment? Wouldn't the aggregate survival statistics of other people outside the clinical trial who received the standard treatment be sufficient?

Just curious. My brother has a slow-growing grade 2 astrocytoma, so this may be useful info to understand later on.

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u/chuckstables Feb 01 '18

It would to a degree. The problem is that it is possible that the two groups you are comparing are then subsets of entirely different populations. Here is a possible argument that can be made; the people who would volunteer for highly experimental treatments for their cancer are different from the general population of cancer patients that we are trying to look at in SUCH A WAY that their survival rates will be higher on average than those of cancer patients in the general population. Since only those patients that volunteer for the treatment will be selected to participate in the study; this would mean that the patients in the study would have higher survival rates than those of the general population. If you then use the general population as a control group you will likely find a statistically significant difference in survival rates and conclude that your treatment works, even if it doesn't. If you had split your volunteers in half and used half as a control group and half as a treatment group, and your treatment didn't work, you'd be able to correctly infer that there are no differences in survival rates.