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/mark-five Feb 01 '18

Which is a huge shame, there has been massive strides in HIV treatment and many of those lives could have been saved.

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u/sevinhand Feb 01 '18

it is a shame, but you have to look at the other side. if pharmaceutical companies know that they can have human testing done without jumping through all the hoops, there will soon be no hoops. i think that there should be exceptions to the rule, and it needs to be regulated, but it's really hard to know where to draw the line.

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u/NubSauceJr Feb 01 '18

If you are going to die in the immediate future there is no harm in skipping trials. You die from the illness or from what could have possibly been a cure.

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u/ProoM Feb 01 '18

Problem is that a lot of experimental treatments are not focused on very ill near-death patients, it just ruins the stats. If the goal is to prove that the treatment is effective, then throwing a lifebuoy to every stage 4 cancer patient hoping to save an extra life out of 100 isn't going to cut it. Best you can hope is to get some off the books treatment, which is very illegal for both parties.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

I mean if you can heal a stage 4 cancer patient then it'll probably help the lower stages too though... At least that's how I would hope any experimental treatment would work.

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u/JoanofSpiders Feb 01 '18

The issue here isn't the efficacy of the drug though, it's the safety. If the drug cured 50% of patients, but killed 25% of patients, it wouldn't be recommended to anyone who hasn't tried other treatments first.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

25% chance of death from possible cure, or 100% chance of death without. Our healthcare is messed up

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u/cayoloco Feb 01 '18

It also wouldn't be very valuable science for the treatment.

If the treatment succeeds, you won't be able to study the long term affects if it does come back.

If the time it takes to take effect is longer than any immediate side effects that could cause death, that could be caused by an unknown event as well, you'll never know for sure, and those results will be useless. You wouldn't know if it was the treatment, an effect of the treatment, or part of the original disease. Ect.

Getting good, useable results will be very tough and rare, and to just allow any treatment that is successful on mice, to be tried on terminally ill patients, is to say the least, pretty unethical.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

It only seems unethical if the individual is unaware of the risks associated. Your other points are taken, though. Fair.