As is often the case, the title is hyperbolic. The discovery applies to 20% of tumors, and "one of cancer's significant defenses" or "a key weakness of cancer" would be more accurate.
That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you.
Not hyperbolic, just incomplete ... this drug inhibits the KRAS mutation that is the "master switch" for 90% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colon cancers. KRAS was considered "undruggable" so this is a huge breakthrough which is why oncologists gave a standing ovation for nearly a minute in the middle of a talk, with some of them in tears.
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
It won't help... mind you this is an article from the economist. There is no such thing as a cancer "master switch", that would equal a disease master switch and that point we have solved biology.
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
Please remember that science is under attack in the United States - new proposals would gut the nih even beyond the horror that is ongoing. As a scientist I am horrified and I truly hope that we don’t abandon the usas historically strong investment in the future.
1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
Horrible disease. We just buried my wife’s father because of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. A month ago, he was still living his life as usual. Then he developed abdominal pain, was diagnosed, and died three weeks later.
I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection. That could save many lives too.
Another ongoing HN thread from yesterday around some exciting cancer treatment breakthroughs, this time with a CRISPR Cas12a2 mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506997 - something of a modern-day (and more accurate) Lorenzo's Oil!
I’m surprised Michael Levin’s research hasn’t expanded much beyond a certain YouTube media bubble. They’re able to start and stop cancer growth with only voltage changes between cells, likewise they can also trigger regeneration or anatomical changes using voltage changes. His research seems to suggest a lot of important anatomical plans are stored in an electric field around the body, not in the DNA. This model’s explanation for cancer is that some cells become disconnected from this field and start growing independently of the overall body plan.
I love his work (even though I know little more than what he says in interviews). I am also surprised it's not more widely known / applied. I am very skeptical of conspiracy-minded thinking, so I'd much rather assume his and his team's work hasn't reached escape velocity from obscurity. Especially with larger industries, it takes time and significant breakthroughs to become "a household name", so to speak.
They are working on getting in vivo studies going from what I remember - it's going to take a positive result in a trial on real patients to get attention - that's just how medicine works. You have to show it actually improves longevity and/or patient quality of life before anyone has a reason to care.
It is more than plausible that spending money on AI is spending money on healthcare. I believe with little certainty that AI will help us find new ways to fight disease, improve our health and live longer lives.
If anyone finds this thread because they or someone in their life is currently facing down a pancreatic cancer diagnosis I want you to know that we had significant success with our loved one by focusing, on our end, on diet.
The patient's metastasis markers were so high the value was literally off of the maximum value on the graph on the chart they gave us in the literature, and so, well beyond the level of being surgery eligible.
Over the 12 chemo cycles that number dropped to levels that cancer free people have, and they have gone on to outlive almost every statistic and remain cancer free to this day.
When researching pancreatic cancer following their diagnosis one thing that stood out to me is how the majority of scientific knowledge surrounding cancer addresses the cancer's metabolism. Pancreatic cancer is an IGF-1 (Insulin Growth Factor) metabolic cancer. This can be interpreted as the cancer uses sugar as its fuel source to grow, and in the absence of sugar can alter its internal metabolism to use an amino acid called glutamine as fuel instead. Glutamine is an amino acid found in animal products such as meat and dairy.
With this knowledge we went with a food regiment of removing ALL sugar, and animal products.
The results were significant. Even in their 70s they were able to do the full 12 cycle chemo treatment without needing to delay a single cycle due to negative health markers, and without any major side effects (except fatigue).
The tumor shrunk form 4.2 cm to 2 cm after 6 chemo treatments, and finally shrunk to 1 cm following their final treatment before surgery. (Compare this to studies on tumor shrinkage for the same cancer and chemo treatment, such as: https://www.healio.com/news/gastroenterology/20210722/early-... )
It is my opinion that at this time medical treatment is essential, both chemo and surgical intervention, but if you want something that you can do to try to increase the efficacy of those treatments I highly recommend this nutritional vector as well!
Unfortunately, anecdotes are not data, and although a patient can try anything they want, there is no way to know that such dietary changes are beneficial or potentially harmful for most patients without doing a randomized controlled trial and hoping for strong adherence from the participants.
It's why I referenced the metabolic pathways derived from data backed research, linked to a data driven study, and used language like "we had significant success with our loved one" and "if you want something that you can do to try".
Honestly this reads like an "aHCkTualLy!1!" from someone without experience of having a loved one suffering from a cancer diagnosis.
Perhaps you've yet to realize but shallow skepticism against every idea is also distinct from data.
I dug a lot into "starving cancer" while we tried to save our dog from an aggressive sarcoma. I can't find his name off hand but I recall reading about a researcher who used a ketogenic diet to keep glucose low, and then occasionally gave drugs to "hammer" the cancer by quickly and temporarily depleting glutamine as well.
As is often the case, the title is hyperbolic. The discovery applies to 20% of tumors, and "one of cancer's significant defenses" or "a key weakness of cancer" would be more accurate.
That said, I'll happily take "we discovered a key weakness in 20% of cancers," please and thank you.
20% is still a huge number. (Your comment also acknowledges this of course. That just popped out at me.)
Not hyperbolic, just incomplete ... this drug inhibits the KRAS mutation that is the "master switch" for 90% of pancreatic cancers and 50% of colon cancers. KRAS was considered "undruggable" so this is a huge breakthrough which is why oncologists gave a standing ovation for nearly a minute in the middle of a talk, with some of them in tears.
Aren't those 20 per cent of tumors more concentrated on the "intractable" side? If so, then the hyperbole is forgivable.
It does seem like those 20% are exactly on the nasty side. So even more impressive.
5 replies →
What does this mean in layman's terms? How will this potentially help me if I get cancer?
Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner.
One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.
This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.
This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.
So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.
65 replies →
It won't help... mind you this is an article from the economist. There is no such thing as a cancer "master switch", that would equal a disease master switch and that point we have solved biology.
1 reply →
One of the many therapies that are being developed so that you can survive longer even with the most lethal tumours.
Only on HN can you get content like this. What a community.
You should be thankful that they're posting about a real drug that is in human trials and yet another "in mice" pipedream
To offer context for others:
The bigger deal about this is that KRAS was considered an "undruggable" target.
Recent advancements have allowed us to design biologics to do things we previously thought impossible, which broadens the horizons for other treatments in the future.
Baby steps.
What's next then?
Other cancers, obesity, name it.
https://archive.ph/d4mT2
The relevant line is:
"oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daraxonrasib
I kinda want to see a group of oncologists lose it and go wild and party like never before.
You sir are the salt of the internet
Does anyone have a link to the conference session?
The study this article references is here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06625320
Please remember that science is under attack in the United States - new proposals would gut the nih even beyond the horror that is ongoing. As a scientist I am horrified and I truly hope that we don’t abandon the usas historically strong investment in the future.
Kindly share more details
1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
13 replies →
I've been wondering why they attack science outside of they think it is woke and liberal.
It makes no sense to cut off the hand that saves you even as a rich billionaire who wants to control people in a fascist society.
They don’t believe in competence because they’ve never experienced it. They think everything is narrative and spectacle.
It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.
Everyone likes to think that their opponents are evil, highly intelligent, silently scheming types like the legendary Cardinal Richelieu.
In reality, mediocre thinkers with inflated egos and little understanding of long-term consequences are pulling the strings almost everywhere.
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
Horrible disease. We just buried my wife’s father because of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. A month ago, he was still living his life as usual. Then he developed abdominal pain, was diagnosed, and died three weeks later.
I think we should also invest more in better diagnostics and early cancer detection. That could save many lives too.
Another ongoing HN thread from yesterday around some exciting cancer treatment breakthroughs, this time with a CRISPR Cas12a2 mechanism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506997 - something of a modern-day (and more accurate) Lorenzo's Oil!
I’m surprised Michael Levin’s research hasn’t expanded much beyond a certain YouTube media bubble. They’re able to start and stop cancer growth with only voltage changes between cells, likewise they can also trigger regeneration or anatomical changes using voltage changes. His research seems to suggest a lot of important anatomical plans are stored in an electric field around the body, not in the DNA. This model’s explanation for cancer is that some cells become disconnected from this field and start growing independently of the overall body plan.
I love his work (even though I know little more than what he says in interviews). I am also surprised it's not more widely known / applied. I am very skeptical of conspiracy-minded thinking, so I'd much rather assume his and his team's work hasn't reached escape velocity from obscurity. Especially with larger industries, it takes time and significant breakthroughs to become "a household name", so to speak.
They are working on getting in vivo studies going from what I remember - it's going to take a positive result in a trial on real patients to get attention - that's just how medicine works. You have to show it actually improves longevity and/or patient quality of life before anyone has a reason to care.
How many cure for cancer news we have 10 yrs ago and none of them goes online?
This is a drug that has passed phase 3 clinical trials.
We should be spending the same amount of money on health and disease as we spend on AI. Ogogogogogo
It is more than plausible that spending money on AI is spending money on healthcare. I believe with little certainty that AI will help us find new ways to fight disease, improve our health and live longer lives.
[dead]
[dead]
If anyone finds this thread because they or someone in their life is currently facing down a pancreatic cancer diagnosis I want you to know that we had significant success with our loved one by focusing, on our end, on diet.
The patient's metastasis markers were so high the value was literally off of the maximum value on the graph on the chart they gave us in the literature, and so, well beyond the level of being surgery eligible.
Over the 12 chemo cycles that number dropped to levels that cancer free people have, and they have gone on to outlive almost every statistic and remain cancer free to this day.
When researching pancreatic cancer following their diagnosis one thing that stood out to me is how the majority of scientific knowledge surrounding cancer addresses the cancer's metabolism. Pancreatic cancer is an IGF-1 (Insulin Growth Factor) metabolic cancer. This can be interpreted as the cancer uses sugar as its fuel source to grow, and in the absence of sugar can alter its internal metabolism to use an amino acid called glutamine as fuel instead. Glutamine is an amino acid found in animal products such as meat and dairy.
With this knowledge we went with a food regiment of removing ALL sugar, and animal products.
The results were significant. Even in their 70s they were able to do the full 12 cycle chemo treatment without needing to delay a single cycle due to negative health markers, and without any major side effects (except fatigue).
The tumor shrunk form 4.2 cm to 2 cm after 6 chemo treatments, and finally shrunk to 1 cm following their final treatment before surgery. (Compare this to studies on tumor shrinkage for the same cancer and chemo treatment, such as: https://www.healio.com/news/gastroenterology/20210722/early-... )
It is my opinion that at this time medical treatment is essential, both chemo and surgical intervention, but if you want something that you can do to try to increase the efficacy of those treatments I highly recommend this nutritional vector as well!
Best wishes for you and your loved ones.
Unfortunately, anecdotes are not data, and although a patient can try anything they want, there is no way to know that such dietary changes are beneficial or potentially harmful for most patients without doing a randomized controlled trial and hoping for strong adherence from the participants.
> anecdotes are not data
It's 2026, this is SOP.
It's why I referenced the metabolic pathways derived from data backed research, linked to a data driven study, and used language like "we had significant success with our loved one" and "if you want something that you can do to try".
Honestly this reads like an "aHCkTualLy!1!" from someone without experience of having a loved one suffering from a cancer diagnosis.
Perhaps you've yet to realize but shallow skepticism against every idea is also distinct from data.
While you chose make this comment without providing links or data to support your claim I will do the real work of finding even more data for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...
5 replies →
Did Steve Jobs die from believing something similar (while skipping chemo)
I'm fuzzy on the details, but I think he also did wildly unhealthy things like only eating apples or almonds or somesuch.
We made sure to still cover all nutritional needs while following the diet.
This meant a diverse array of food sources, in sufficient amounts to meet micro and macro nutrient recommended daily values, that we cooked ourselves.
I dug a lot into "starving cancer" while we tried to save our dog from an aggressive sarcoma. I can't find his name off hand but I recall reading about a researcher who used a ketogenic diet to keep glucose low, and then occasionally gave drugs to "hammer" the cancer by quickly and temporarily depleting glutamine as well.
Isn’t glutamine also part of vegan diets? I don’t eat meat myself, but your assertion has me wondering about glutamine.
Yes, and your body requires it for things like muscle maintenance.
Also, sugar is essential to what makes you you, that is, the brain requires glucose to function.
The goal is to reduce excess intake of these things to reduce their availability for any cancer cells to use to grow and divide.
1 reply →
Do they maintain the same diet today?
Yes.
They slacked a bit some months following the surgery, and their blood markers started to drastically slip almost immediately.
Might be also worth noting that prior to all of this they were a staunch "antivegan midwestern farm boy" for 70 years.
Now, after witnessing the results, they are all in on the new dietary lifestyle change, and tell all their friends.
1 reply →
May have? It also may have not.
Thanks for posting useful link !