[Sandwich]

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cancer-t-cell-treatment-extraordinary-results-in-study/

[Bobboau]

even if it's mostly effective on blood cancers, you would think it would be helpful as an anti-metastasis treatment also.

[Rodo]

Great news!
Hope they get a solid result across the board and get this out soon.

[NGTM-1R]

Very small study. Unsure of meaningful statistical significance.

[karajorma]

A few things

1) This isn't a cancer cure, it's a cure for a few specific kinds of cancer. Specifically blood based ones.
2) This is a very extreme form of treatment. They gave it to 29 people who had no other form of treatment available because they had exhausted their options. 27 went into remission. Quite a few of them had to sent to intensive care because of the full-body inflammations the treatment caused. The other two patients died.
3) These forms of cancer can usually be treated quite well by much less extreme methods.

Ars Technica have a good article on the subject.

[qwadtep]

That said, a last-resort breakthrough is still a breakthrough, and allows researchers to start refining the technique.

[Sandwich]

That said, a last-resort breakthrough is still a breakthrough, and allows researchers to start refining the technique.

Indeed - you can kind of compare this to the early days of flight (and before). Numerous people died trying to fly, but once the Wright brothers landed (no pun intended) on the right design, things really started to, erm, take off... (really, I didn't mean it!).

It's the same as with many new scientific breakthroughs. There's risk and danger when taking the breakthrough to the level where human beings are directly involved, but things get refined and improved over time, made safer, easier, cheaper, more accessible, etc. I'm sure this will follow that pattern as well.

[karajorma]

That said, a last-resort breakthrough is still a breakthrough, and allows researchers to start refining the technique.

Absolutely. And there are 29 people alive who probably would have died otherwise.

But let's not assume that this will definitely be more than a last resort treatment. Hopefully it will.

[MP-Ryan]

Modified T cell treatments have been promising in a variety of applications for some time; the technology (particularly when we get to the point of being able to mimic antigen adaptation and formation in cultured patient tissues, as opposed to relying on other host organisms, like mice) is very exciting.  It's good to see it starting to get limited clinical applications in human patients.  This tech also has a healthy amount of promise in the treatment of certain infectious diseases as well - the body is surprisingly quick to develop antigens for novel infectious agents, considering it's basically trial-and-error on an extremely rapid/large scale - as it will essentially allow for "crowdsourcing" of effective T-cell production.  Where vaccines inject an "artificial" antigen to produce a natural immune response, think of this as injecting an "artificial" immune response to combat a natural antigen.... with the added benefit that, if the T cells can be modified to be accepted by the host, you get Memory B cell formation too.  Win.

The trick, as always, isn't so much killing the cancer or the disease.  That's easy.  It's killing cancerous cells without killing the host that's the tricky part.

As an aside, in terms of novelty and extremeness, this is pretty comparable to the treatment for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCIDs), but hopefully can be made much less risky in the long term (whereas the eradication and rebuild of the host immune system needed to treat SCIDs hasn't changed much).

[Rhys]

Man, If I had a dollar for every time I've seen that headline...

[Dragon]

This treatment is extraordinary, but in a slightly different way than it's usually indicated. It'll likely remain a niche treatment, but what is interesting about it that it's one of the first instances of manipulating human cells outside the body and re-inserting them. Not quite genetic engineering (as far as I understood, they're inserting a molecule, not code to make the cell produce it), but pretty close. It is, of course, great to have as a last resort blood cancer treatment, but to me, the real deal is that it may pave the way for further treatments in that vein, perhaps even including actual genetic engineering. Ultimately, I feel that this is the only way we're going to really "cure" some diseases, including most cancers.

Also, we should remember that most likely, there will never be such a thing as a single "cancer cure" (other than something equally broad, like "gene therapy"). Cancer is not a disease, but a family of diseases. Blood cancer is only tangentially related to things such as brain tumors, lung or breast cancer. Even lumping the various kinds of tumors together is a mistake, though they share more similarities.

[MP-Ryan]

This treatment is extraordinary, but in a slightly different way than it's usually indicated. It'll likely remain a niche treatment, but what is interesting about it that it's one of the first instances of manipulating human cells outside the body and re-inserting them.

No, it's not.

Not quite genetic engineering (as far as I understood, they're inserting a molecule, not code to make the cell produce it), but pretty close.

No, it's not close.  They did in fact insert a synthetic chimeric antigen receptor gene, which was then expressed by the modified T cells. https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Paper16827.html

perhaps even including actual genetic engineering. Ultimately, I feel that this is the only way we're going to really "cure" some diseases, including most cancers.

Stop basing your understanding of molecular biology on science fiction and media.  We already can, and regularly do, "actual genetic engineering."  Of course, we rarely if ever actually call it that because most scientists don't have aspirations to be idiot Hollywood screenwriters who wouldn't know what genetic engineering was if they were hit in the head with a 1st year university-level biology textbook.

[Dragon]

So, did you attend that presentation? I'm not sure if the what you linked refers to the therapy being discussed. Or to a therapy that was actually tried, for that matter (the description doesn't definitely state that). The article linked in the OP had no mention of genetic modifications. I based my statement on this. If you have a (non-paywalled) source to state otherwise, feel free to post it.

Yes, genetic engineering is pretty routine, but genetic engineering in humans is rather controversial. This is why I consider it so important. It's not that we don't know how to do it, it's that some people don't want us to do it. This therapy is a good argument towards similar techniques.

This treatment is extraordinary, but in a slightly different way than it's usually indicated. It'll likely remain a niche treatment, but what is interesting about it that it's one of the first instances of manipulating human cells outside the body and re-inserting them.

No, it's not.

Source. Prove that, in fact, this sort of thing is in fact routine and has been done for quite some time. I said it was one of the first therapies to involve "reworking" cells like that. This group of therapies is a recent invention. This is also the first time I saw one make enough news to be posted here. I don't follow the development of therapies of this type on a regular basis, so I don't know whether this has been done before with a similar degree of success (people might very well have been attempting that sort of therapy for quite some time. That doesn't count), but no matter how you slice it, it's a big success for a rather new approach.

[Phantom Hoover]

- mp-ryan, has academic background in genetics

- dragon, notorious internet expert in everything, recently dropped off physics degree

who shall i possibly believe

[Bobboau]

I'm not convinced they are actually disagreeing about anything of substance.

[Dragon]

We're not. He's nitpicking my statement and I'm telling him to back it up. And for the record, I swapped from physics to biophysics. We're not discussing the Standard Model or String Theory here (and that's where "physics" take you at our uni. Our system is very inflexible, especially compared to UK or US).

Making a bunch of bold claims with one (rather poor, I might add) source to back them up, all while being condescending about it, isn't the best way to make me convinced that I was in error. If this therapy was actually based on genetic engineering, then it'd be one of its more successful applications.

If this is the same thing that is mentioned in the Wikipedia article as having cured one girl of leukemia, then I was still correct about everything but the part in which I said it wasn't genetic engineering. Just reading the rest of that part in which that treatment is mentioned shows why (for the record, skip to the "2015" part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#2010s).

who shall i possibly believe

Neither. Check the sources they used by yourself. I had the article in the OP and Wikipedia (granted, a lazy thing to do). He has a summary of a symposium, about which I can't even tell if it is relevant (and unless you happened to attend it, you wouldn't know, either).

[MP-Ryan]

So, did you attend that presentation? I'm not sure if the what you linked refers to the therapy being discussed.

What I linked is the original research, via the original researcher. I'm not sure how the abstract from their research is a rather poor source. That linked is cited via a link in the ArsTech article (this one: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/fhcr-srf020516.php).  Which, if you read it, leads nicely into...

Source. Prove that, in fact, this sort of thing is in fact routine and has been done for quite some time. I said it was one of the first therapies to involve "reworking" cells like that. This group of therapies is a recent invention. This is also the first time I saw one make enough news to be posted here. I don't follow the development of therapies of this type on a regular basis, so I don't know whether this has been done before with a similar degree of success (people might very well have been attempting that sort of therapy for quite some time. That doesn't count), but no matter how you slice it, it's a big success for a rather new approach.

Similar gene therapy for SCID, using a retroviral vector, has existed since 1990.  It involves the use of patient T-cells, modified with an inserted ADA gene.  This is a near-identical process using techniques for molecular genetic therapy that have been tried and tested for twenty-five years.  It's not new.  This specific application and treatment is new, but the process is decades-old.  Feel free to Google it.

Part of the reason Dragon's kind of puffery about genetics annoys me so much is that the general public still things genetic engineering is something out of sci-fi when it isn't.  We can do it, the science behind it is well-established, and the associated risks have diminished considerably since we first began.  It remains a solution of last resort because modifying the genome of a living organism is fiendishly complex and there are, for most illnesses, much better options.