Vaccine Shown To Prolong Life of Patients With Aggressive Brain Cancer (theguardian.com) 69
The world's first vaccine to treat deadly cancerous brain tumors can potentially give patients years of extra life, a global clinical trial has concluded. The Guardian reports: A senior NHS doctor who was one of the trial's chief investigators said the evidence showed DCVax had resulted in "astonishing" enhanced survival for patients. One patient in the 331-person multicenter global study lived for more than eight years after receiving DCVax. In Britain, 53-year-old Nigel French is still alive seven years after having it. If approved by medical regulators, DCVax would be the first new treatment in 17 years for newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and the first in 27 years for people in whom it had returned. "The total results are astonishing," said Prof Keyoumars Ashkan, a neurosurgeon at King's College hospital in London who was the European chief investigator of the trial. "The final results of this phase three trial... offer fresh hope to patients battling with glioblastoma."
Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.
The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."
Trial researchers found that newly diagnosed patients who had the vaccine survived for 19.3 months on average, compared with 16.5 months for those who received a placebo. Participants with recurrent glioblastoma who had had DCVax lived on average for 13.2 months after receiving it, compared with just 7.8 months for those who did not. Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so, according to the results of the trial, which were published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.
The vaccine is a form of immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is programmed to track down and attack the tumor. It is the first developed to tackle brain tumors. "The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man," said Ashkan. "The vaccine is produced by combining proteins from a patient's own tumor with their white blood cells. This educates the white cells to recognize the tumor. "When the vaccine is administered, these educated white blood cells then help the rest of the patient's immune system recognize the tumor as something it needs to fight against and destroy. Almost like training a sniffer dog."
Vaccines versus other medicines (Score:2)
That's a reasonable position, but it reflects a misunderstanding on what exactly a vaccine is, and how it differs from other medications.
Other medicines attack the problem directly - whether it's antibiotics attacking bacteria, or chemotherapy attacking cancer cells, it's the medicine doing the work. And once the medicine is gone, the benefit stops.
A vaccine though is a medicine that does NOT attack the problem directly, instead it trains your immune system to fight it more effectively. And that training
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Yet his followers give God credit when something good happens, "praise the lord," etc., but when something bad happens, it's human's fault somehow.
My flavor of Christianity teaches that God does everything for a reason, even if you don't like it, and you won't necessarily know why.
My brother died of Glioblastoma two months ago. He was a great person and didn't deserve that.
There'd better be a good fucking explanation.
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Have you seen his alleged masterpiece? This planet here?
But read the manual, it tells you in detail why it's in that crappy state. If you move back through the creation description, you'll notice that the manufacturer rested on the last day, after working 6 days. In other words, the world was made on a Monday.
After what must have been an endless weekend.
Probably he was still hung over from that weekend and, well, have you ever made anything worth a damn on a Monday?
Re: God (Score:3)
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What else can we expect from the same being that can't protect kids from earthquakes, storms, pedos, and psychos.
You must have missed the part where this being so royally screwed up it impregnated another man's wife (breaking one of its own rules), abandoned the two of them, then sat by and watched as its offspring was murdered on the orders of its chosen people, all in an attempt to correct its mistakes.
And that doesn't get into the time it murdered almost the entire population of the planet it was so frus
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone remember when a "vaccine" was guaranteed to just work rather than giving varying amounts of protection?
No.
It was always about statistics. No one person ever had an absolute guarantee.
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Are you still trying to redefine 'vaccine'? No one is buying it. Hell, I doubt even you believe your own bullshit.
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Interesting)
So the word can now be used to describe "protection" against not only a foreign bacteria / virus / fungus, but against your own tumor cells?
I, too, am wary of stretching the term "vaccine" enough to cover this use case, but apparently the medical establishment has decided that training of the immune system for therapeutic reasons should use the same term as prophylactic training, so I'll begrudgingly accept it.
Anyone remember when a "vaccine" was guaranteed to just work rather than giving varying amounts of protection?
Nope. I can't remember any vaccine that ever was guaranteed to "just work". A single polio vaccine dose is something like 82%, two doses is 90%, etc. The MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% against mumps, and 97% against rubella. The smallpox vaccine is 95% effective. And so on.
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Insightful)
I, too, am wary of stretching the term "vaccine" enough to cover this use case, but apparently the medical establishment has decided that training of the immune system for therapeutic reasons should use the same term as prophylactic training, so I'll begrudgingly accept it.
It's not a stretch though. It's true that in common parlance, we've associated vaccines with viruses, and prophylactic use, but a vaccine has *always* been something that trains the immune system to react to something- with no regard to whether it was reactive, or prophylactic. I.e., common perception of the word is wrong.
Perhaps it's better to try to train people to understand the word correctly, than to stop using the word. I don't know.
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I, too, am wary of stretching the term "vaccine" enough to cover this use case, but apparently the medical establishment has decided that training of the immune system for therapeutic reasons should use the same term as prophylactic training, so I'll begrudgingly accept it.
It's not a stretch though. It's true that in common parlance, we've associated vaccines with viruses, and prophylactic use, but a vaccine has *always* been something that trains the immune system to react to something- with no regard to whether it was reactive, or prophylactic. I.e., common perception of the word is wrong.
I disagree. The term was pretty much exclusively used for prophylactic training prior to cancer vaccines. Even for things like rabies or tetanus, the term used is "post-exposure prophylaxis".
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Post-Exposure Prophylaxis is any treatment started after infection. If you are treated with a vaccine for Post-Exposure Prophylaxis, that doesn't somehow make it no longer a vaccine.
Rabies and Tetanus PEP aren't treated with vaccines, because vaccines are too slow. Instead, you're pumped full of pre-trained antibodies. (and usually a vaccine too just for good measure, but again, it won't wor
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Post-Exposure Prophylaxis doesn't have to be a vaccine, though a vaccine can be used for Post-Exposure Prophylaxis.
I neither said nor implied that it did.
Post-Exposure Prophylaxis is any treatment started after infection. If you are treated with a vaccine for Post-Exposure Prophylaxis, that doesn't somehow make it no longer a vaccine.
You obviously fundamentally misunderstood my post if you think I don't understand that. Let me try again.
The claim was made that the term "vaccine" has *always* referred to training your immune system to recognize antigens for both prophylactic purposes (preventing an infection from taking hold) and therapeutic purposes (treating a condition that already exists). I pointed out that even in the few situations where vaccines have been historically given in the past pos
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I neither said nor implied that it did.
Well that's pretty confusing. You disagreed with the meaning of the word vaccine, and implied that a vaccine should be called a PEP, which is nonsensical.
So I mean, you kind of did imply that it did.
You obviously fundamentally misunderstood my post if you think I don't understand that. Let me try again.
Perhaps. I'll give it a better shot this time.
The claim was made that the term "vaccine" has *always* referred to training your immune system to recognize antigens for both prophylactic purposes (preventing an infection from taking hold) and therapeutic purposes (treating a condition that already exists). I pointed out that even in the few situations where vaccines have been historically given in the past post-exposure, doing so was still considered prophylactic use because the vaccination still happens prior to the infection significantly taking hold.
OK, that is definitely a different angle than I interpreted.
We can use that.
Rabies is incredibly slow to infect people, taking anywhere from several days up to an entire year to reach the brain, at which point it suddenly becomes deadly. IIRC, historical treatments for rabies were just the vaccines, not human rabies immunoglobulin. And even now, you get only a single dose of the immunoglobulin, whereas you continue getting vaccine doses repeatedly over a period of time. So I disagree with your assertion that the vaccine part is just "for good measure". If anything, I would argue that the immunoglobulin is for good measure, and the vaccine is the primary treatment.
Slow down. It's a lot more complicated than that, and you know it.
PEP is administered swiftly and severely for rabies because you can't know when you will become symptomatic.
And once you
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Rabies is incredibly slow to infect people, taking anywhere from several days up to an entire year to reach the brain, at which point it suddenly becomes deadly. IIRC, historical treatments for rabies were just the vaccines, not human rabies immunoglobulin. And even now, you get only a single dose of the immunoglobulin, whereas you continue getting vaccine doses repeatedly over a period of time. So I disagree with your assertion that the vaccine part is just "for good measure". If anything, I would argue that the immunoglobulin is for good measure, and the vaccine is the primary treatment.
Slow down. It's a lot more complicated than that, and you know it. PEP is administered swiftly and severely for rabies because you can't know when you will become symptomatic.
No disagreement there.
No rational person would risk giving you a vaccine when they can pump you full of pre-formed antibodies that are going to give you instant-near-immunity.
Anymore, yes, this is true. But bear in mind that human rabies immunoglobulin treatment only dates back to the 1970s, and the rabies vaccine dates back a century earlier. I guess there was some animal immunoglobulin in some of the earlier preparations?
The HRIG is not the side show, here. It's what saves your life. It's what kills the virus. The problem, is that it takes approximately 7 days for the vaccine to produce enough antibodies to be effective.
Yeah, but per the WHO, the incubation period for rabies is typically two to three months [who.int]. The HRIG is for cases where it would kill you before you can develop adequate antibodies on your own, and don't get me wrong, it's a good thing
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Yeah, but per the WHO, the incubation period for rabies is typically two to three months [who.int]. The HRIG is for cases where it would kill you before you can develop adequate antibodies on your own, and don't get me wrong, it's a good thing to do, because it brings the fatality rate down to roughly zero by starting to beat back the virus sooner, but AFAIK more often than not, the vaccine alone can do that. It just would be really stupid to take the extra risk. :-)
Oh I don't disagree with that assertion at all. My argument was more that, "since you can't be sure, you must HRIG".
Obviously, statistically speaking, a vaccine is likely good enough in most cases.
I'm not saying I reject the term outright, because it certainly has gained traction over the last four decades, but I still see it more as immunotherapy than vaccination. That's just my opinion, though.
Immunotherapy has a strong overlap, and is also acceptable.
I understand why you don't like the word vaccine being used- it's because it has developed a certain connotation to it that is far more limited than what the word actually means.
As I said, I don't know if the solution is to... change the word's definit
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It absolutely was not a "cancer vaccine", it was a "TB vaccine" that had immunotherapeutic action against cancer.
Heh, yeah, that's a fair point. :-)
The real irony there is that arguably the vaccine part isn't even what has an effect. As I understand it, the vaccine consists of actual TB spores, which I can only assume are inactivated or attenuated, plus "specific substance of maruyama", or SSM, which is almost entirely a single polysaccharide (arabinomannan) from the outer shell of the bacterium. The latter is, of course, an antigen that your immune system attacks, but in a way, it behaves more like an adjuvant, cau
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What universe do you live in? Nothing has a 100% success rate. Not every seed you plant will grow. I mean, how many products on amazon that have over 1000 reviews don't have at least one 1-star review? Nothing comes with a 100% guarantee.
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Informative)
Vaccines "just work" when they reduce the occurrence of the target disease to the extent that it cannot propagate, then it protects the entire population 100% (even those that aren't vaccinated) since the pathogen is no longer able to survive in that population. That requires a (statistically defined) level of effectiveness in individuals AND a (statistically defined) level of take up in the population. Different vaccines have differing levels of effectiveness threshold for those statistically defined criteria. Finally, a vaccine that works 100% only does so if it's a non-mutating (i.e. read slow enough mutating) pathogen since the pathogen cannot mutate its way around the protection provided by the vaccine.
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"now" as in like since 40 years ago? Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov] Stay in your lane jackass.
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Insightful)
Vaccines never "just worked", where does this bullshit come from?
Yes, there are vaccines with higher and lower degrees of protection, which mostly depends on how long the vaccine has been in development and how fast the agent it is protecting against mutates. The longer the development and the lower the mutation rate, the better, in general, the protection. Other factors come into play, like the way the agent is working (tetanus is a particular insidious one in this regard, as is the "vaccine" against it). But even having it in development for ages doesn't confer a 100% protection. The WHO target for malaria vaccines (which I hope we can agree on being one of those vaccines that have been in development for decades) is 75%. Recent a new development reached a protection rate of up to 80% in children [nature.com], which was heralded like it's the second coming.
It could well be that people thought that vaccines "just worked" because until about 2 years ago, nobody gave two fucks about vaccines because, well, biology is hard to understand and most people can't be bothered to. Then suddenly the whole thing became a political agenda, and as soon as politics enter a field, the bullshit peddles enter the field who then spread their bovine manure on people who don't know jack but think they know a lot (a very dangerous combination), who then take this "great revelation" and "new truth" and start spreading it like they just learned something profound but actually were just bullshitted, because they thought something else was true that never was.
So what are you, the manure salesman or the idiot swallowing it?
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No, because that was never the claim, and I wish people would stop saying this. Influensa, Polio, etc most of those are in a similar 50-70% efficacy range to the covid vaccines (Influenza efficacy varies wildly depending on how well dominant strains are predicted, Polio efficacy varies depending on whether patients have had the full 5 booster dose regime. All sound familiar?).
Nothing has changed in
Re:Gettin pretty fast and loose with the word vacc (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing has changed in terminology.
Two weeks to slow the spread.
Literally could have and would have been accurate, if it had been complied with. But all it takes is one non-compliance event and there are rabbits on both sides of the fence.
But you already knew that.
If you get the vaccine, you can't get COVID again.
One: nobody legitimate in the medical industry was saying that. It was already widely known that SARS-Cov2 mutates like most viruses, making it very clear that the original vaccines couldn't be a one-time-and-forever shot.
Two: at the time they came available we (the global sum of humanity) didn't have accurate information on if reinfection was possible at all, within the same strain. Some diseases the immune system becomes permanently attuned to. AFAIK chicken pox is a good example. Virtually nobody gets reinfected. But we didn't know what the reaction would be for SARS-Cov2 within the same strain. Nobody was claiming to have that knowledge.
But you already knew that.
No, that inexpensive solution is nothing but horse dewormer. It's worthless and therefore not approved for use. Same goes for monoclonal antibodies.
Right. The medication that doesn't work doesn't work. It still doesn't work. There isn't a country on the planet that decided to adopt HCQ and mysteriously is COVID-free. The closest was New Zealand, who stayed clean for a very long time... by closing the borders and isolating... just like the original "two weeks" point. They just had to do it longer because the rest of the world didn't.
But you already knew that.
Nothing has changed in the liars we call leaders either.
There's a difference between a} lying, b} being incorrect, c} being mis-quoted, and d} having words put in your mouth.
... you already knew that.
Trump lied about plenty. The vaccine manufacturers and proponents are having words put in their mouths (by you). Not the same thing at all.
But...
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Two weeks to slow the spread.
Literally could have and would have been accurate, if it had been complied with. But all it takes is one non-compliance event and there are rabbits on both sides of the fence. But you already knew that.
We already knew the chances of American compliance, just as we knew how serious it was two months before that "spread" campaign was started when we wanted to shut down international travel from identified hot spots. The response from our Government leaders was to label that action racist and xenophobic while dancing maskless in Chinatown.
And you know that.
If you get the vaccine, you can't get COVID again.
One: nobody legitimate in the medical industry was saying that.
I'll just stop you right there. Plenty of people citizens look to (to include Government Representatives and leaders) were saying it. And then never co
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While I fell for the vaccine, I've never been treated for COVID. Sorry to disappoint your assumptions.
I've known quite a few people who were able (for a very limited time) able to take advantage of monoclonal antibodies (all very successfully). No fucking way in hell were they $2000+, so stop with the bullshit claims already. And quite frankly, even if they were expensive you haven't actually done jack shit to deny my claims.
As far as ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine and others, just fucking stop already.
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Nothing has changed in terminology.
Two weeks to slow the spread.
Literally could have and would have been accurate, if it had been complied with.
How this No True Scotsman [wikipedia.org] fallacy got modded to +5 Informative?
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Nothing has changed in terminology.
Two weeks to slow the spread.
Literally could have and would have been accurate, if it had been complied with. But all it takes is one non-compliance event and there are rabbits on both sides of the fence.
But you already knew that.
I don't think that's quite accurate.
The initial "two weeks to slow the spread" was a choice to shut down the country for two weeks in the hopes of avoiding massive death rates like Italy and NYC experienced.
But then a huge portion of society figured out how to run online, and the service sector jobs were a write-off in a pandemic anyway. So the new choice was "keep death rates low at the cost of some fairly serious lock-down trade-offs" and most of society decided that was the best path forward.
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Vaccines have _never_ been 100% effective, any more than driving safely is 100% effective against car accidents. Germs mutate, and vaccines boost a natural immune system which is hindered by factors like age or other illness for some people.
Feels like it is just the first half of the puzzle (Score:4, Interesting)
Saying that it can give patients years of extra life is something of an exaggeration. A tiny number of patients lived years longer than expected. The average was just two or three extra months. That's a small enough difference that with only 331 people in the trial group, there's a real possibility that a larger study would show regression to the mean, i.e. this might not even do anything at all except in rare fluke cases.
The thing is, glioblastoma is a seriously problematic target for immunotherapy (or any other kind of therapy, for that matter) because of the blood-brain barrier. It apparently exists at the boundary of the BBB, so some cancer cells can potentially be killed off, but others are unlikely to be reached by either chemotherapy or immune cells. My gut says that fully disrupting the BBB in and around the tumor is likely to be critical to taking this from a "this gives you a couple more months" treatment to something that actually gives a real chance at beating the disease.
I really do wish more studies on these sorts of diseases would include experiment arms in which they deliberately disrupt the BBB with focused ultrasound to see if it results in the treatments becoming more effective. It seems like that should literally be a part of the base trial protocol for approximately anything involving the brain and immune system.
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His survival rate was not 0%, and he was not a vegetable prior to death.
He was bedridden though- mostly because he could suffer sudden irrecoverable falls which started becoming dangerous to his health.
My uncle lasted 14 months after diagnosis (which came after 2 falls in short succession down their stairs), and the tumor was inoperable.
What can be taken from the study, is that your chances of making it 5+ years is about doub
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I agree with the final points you make there. Double the chance of 5 years + is certainly going to be a big thing.
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maybe the location in the brain of the cancer has an impact?
I imagine it must.
My friend must have had it in a part of the brain that somehow was more susceptible
I'm no neurosurgeon, but it's not hard to imagine that a mass growing in one part of the brain could have a very different lethality timeline and profile than another.
My uncle was not in his mid 30s, he was in his late 50s.
Still too young, but better than mid 30s.
Fuck cancer.
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Fuck cancer.
So true.
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What can be taken from the study, is that your chances of making it 5+ years is about double that of normal (which is ~6%)
Anyone staring down the barrel of that gun is going to jump on that deal. I know my uncle would have.
No doubt!
And rest assured, every single idiot complaining about "Averages" would be first line to do whatever was necessary to receive this Treatment for themselves or their loved ones, even if it only offered the slimmest of chances for the shortest of times.
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Yeah I lost a friend to it as well. Miserable way to go. She was one of the most brilliant women I know, engineer with an incredibly sharp mind and wit, so it was a cruel fate that it was her brain that the cancer went after.
Even if this only buys someone 6 months to a year, if someones got a remaining lifespan measured in months ,thats still significant. If it can turn it into a 7+ year thing, well thats straight up miraculous.
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Lost my mom to it in January 2022 - diagnosed September 2020, surgery a few months later, straight to chemo and radiation. The surgery removed most or all of the tumor and she was in decent shape, she could still talk and remember things, get around the house and generally take care of herself. In comes the chemo and radiation and it was a downward spiral for all over 2021 until this time last year when she was basically a vegetable. She lasted a few more months on literally a few sips of water and diet cok
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I'm sorry for your loss. But diet coke brings up the need for a public service announcement:
Your body needs calories to survive. I don't understand how so many people can overlook that when hit by serious illness. Just staying alive consumes something like 1000 calories per day, and if you're not eating them, your body WILL start eating itself to survive.
If you or a loved one mostly stops eating, for any reason, whatever is eaten should be as sugar- and starch-rich as possible (starch = complex, slow-dig
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Saying that it can give patients years of extra life is something of an exaggeration.
It literally cannot be.
A tiny number of patients lived years longer than expected.
You literally just proved your first assertion false.
The average was just two or three extra months.
Averages are a terrible way to try to evaluate what happens, here.
It says nothing of the rate of effectiveness, vs. how effective if it when it works.
this might not even do anything at all except in rare fluke cases.
Bingo.
This is acknowledged.
The important breakdown:
Overall 13% of people who received it lived for at least five years after diagnosis, while just 5.7% of those in the control group did so
It about doubles your chances of surviving the disease past the rate that we keep statistics for. Ignore the average quote- it's a useless number without more context.
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Intelligent subsystem? (Score:2)
"The vaccine works by stimulating the patient's own immune system to fight against the patient's tumor. It provides a personalized solution, working with a patient's immune system, which is the most intelligent system known to man,"
If I understand the way that the immune system functions, I would liken it more to an in-built organic AI than anything I would call intelligent.
It reacts to stimuli and produces varying responses, most of which do the right thing. Over time it builds up a "library" of known pathogens which it has dealt with previously and can modify its behavior accordingly.
Unfortunately, sometimes it gets things wrong and decides that molecules normally found within the typical human body don't belong there and attacks th
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>It reacts to stimuli and produces varying responses, most of which do the wrong thing.
Fixed that for you. The immune system is not particularly intelligent, its "intelligence" comes from trying lots and lots of stupid things very quickly, and then focusing on the things that actually work. It only does the right thing early on when fighting something it's already familiar with.
I suppose by numbers it mostly does the right thing, simply because most of the things it tries don't work, and thus never get
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Sounds a lot like insulin. I can fly to Germany and buy a month’s worth of insulin and it’s still cheaper than paying out of pocket in the USA.
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Sounds a lot like insulin. I can fly to Germany and buy a month’s worth of insulin and it’s still cheaper than paying out of pocket in the USA.
Huh. Sounds like a hell of a marketing campaign for German tourism.
Seriously.
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German, Canadian, Mexican... take your pick. Most of the developed world has MUCH cheaper and more effective health care systems than the US, and medical tourism is big business.
A saver for Monsanto's Glysophate (Score:2)
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Glyphosate targets a metabolic pathway in plants that does not exist in humans.
It does not cause human cancers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
More sad (Score:2)
Years of extra life (Score:1)
Re: Years of extra life (Score:1)
I keeps a sick person alive and consuming highly profitable medical "treatments" from big pharma.
The Study (Score:1)
https://jamanetwork.com/journa... [jamanetwork.com]
A useful therapy, but likely disappointing to the developers for not being a complete cure.