Comment by Flere-Imsaho

12 hours ago

[flagged]

The people that want to prompt an LLM will do it.

  • These are all correct observations about the limitations of xenografted mouse models.

    • A great deal of effort and money is spent running studies. I'm inclined to assume the experts in the field are more aware of the tradeoffs of that decision and how to mitigate the downsides than probably all, but certainly the overwhelming majority, of people commenting on this thread.

      Someone who needs to ask an LLM will not be helpful in trying to point out something they missed.

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    • No, they aren't: the second is irrelevant and unphysical. Highly-pressurised cores? Really? "Dense", I could buy, but:

      • If there's blood supply, then (A) it can't be a much higher pressure than the blood pressure (unless there's some Rube Goldberg machine involving active transport), and (B) the tumour is reachable by treatments like this;

      • And if there isn't blood supply, then the tumour's core is necrotic, and a treatment to kill the dead cells wouldn't do anything anyway. (Sure, killing the tissue that isolates a lump of necrotic flesh from the rest of the body might cause new and exciting problems, but somehow I think those might be preferable to incurable breast cancer.)

      The second is just not a relevant criticism. The third, if it's an actual issue, can probably be worked around by tweaking the molecule slightly – and if not, suppressing the immune system isn't that difficult (it's a known side-effect of many chemotherapies). The first, if it's an issue, can be avoided by injecting the medicine near the target site.

      I agree that this treatment might not work in humans, but all the AI's done is taken a generic list of potential concerns, and inserted technobabble to try to make it match the scenario. If you want generic criticism, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47209076: at least that's true.

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Targeted delivery of anti cancer methods is hard. Weather it is multiple radiation beams or anti-body cross linked chemo agents it’s never easy. Chemotherapy poisons the entire body but the cancer cells die faster. A generally administered compound that only affects cancer would be huge.

  • This is kind of true but misses the bigger picture. We have developed many drug options more targeted than traditional chemotherapy, famously Gleevec for example. The question isn't whether we've found one that could work at all, but how well does it work, what types of cancer it works for, and what the side effects are.