Quote Originally Posted by tfranc View Post
You know what’s crazy? We’ve killed cancer literally hundreds of thousands of times in a petri dish.
Well, we're a bit off topic, but let's go therre for a moment. I do a lot consulting work is this area, and I know what's happening.

You start with a petri dish (actually you start with a petri dish or some other small scale device, then move to mice, then move to cynologous monkeys) but assuming it works in THOSE physiological systems, and then you move to humans. And when you move to humans you'd better design a set of trials that are well-designed, with proper samples sizes, statistical methodology, and precise record keeping. This is why making a drug that WORKS most of the time is very very expensive -- and why also making a drug that fails is very very expensive.

CAR-T therapy WORKS. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, an amount of time that is better than chance and which can be seen physiolgically. But it too is VERY expensive because it's administration process is complex and requires a significant period of supervision by health care professionals who, like us, want to get paid.

Quote Originally Posted by AndrewLewis View Post
That's not that crazy. Cancer is easy to kill. The challenge is killing cancer cells without killing the human host.
It's a lot harder to kill PERMANENTLY, which is what really matters. Killing temporarily is what's -- well, not necessarily easier, but more likely. Complete remission over defined time ranges per cancer type is the true metric of success.

CART-T thearpy is not without its issues, specifically cytokine reaction, where the body all of sudden gets these new killer T-Cells and thinks, "Ooh, bad things are happening, let's go on alert!!" and crazy inflammatory things occur. Those episodes can be managed, but you need skilled professionals watching over you like a hawk and making very specific adjustments.

Anyway, back to our original programming.