Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise In Small Trial 91
A personalized cancer vaccine made by BioNTech, the German company that produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, has shown promising results against pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, which teaches patients' immune systems to attack their tumors, provoked an immune response in half of the 16 patients treated, and those patients did not experience relapses of their cancer during the study. The New York Times reports: Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients' tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient's immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech's COVID shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients' cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.
The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said.
In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone."
The study has been published in the journal Nature.
The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said.
In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone."
The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Interesting study (Score:5, Informative)
This is a good line of research.
In 2023 an estimated 64,050 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the U.S., and more than 50,550 will die from the disease. Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers. It is currently the 3rd leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States after lung and colon. https://pancreatic.org/pancrea... [pancreatic.org]
Re: Interesting study (Score:2, Interesting)
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he would be either one of the last people to die from it or one of the first to beat it with treatment because of where the research was headed
How did that work out for other people whose pancreatic cancers are neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) rather than adenocarcinomas? Science says [moffitt.org] that it hasn't changed since he was diagnosed: It has probably metastasized by the point of detection and thus is probably not curable, but there's a chance of curing it before metastasis. Even to his death, he lived in a reality distortion field.
On the other hand, this study [nature.com] was in adenocarcinomas, which are typically more aggressive than NETs. Adenocarcinomas typica
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Re: Interesting study (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortune reported that he resisted his doctor's pleas to get treatment, in favour of alternative medicine. By the time he got it treated properly it was too far advanced.
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You must have read something different from me. https://www.forbes.com/sites/a... [forbes.com]
He was trying juice and acupuncture until he finally tried actual medicine but it was too late.
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I remember reading an interview with Steve Jobs regarding his pancreatic cancer. He had highly specialized treatment ...
Wasn't he the one who postponed his treatment for far too long relying instead on "folks" a.k.a "alternative" remedies (which some call "medicine") by then the cancer metastasized and considering pancreatic cancer being one of the deadliest and fastest, he didn't have much chance.
Google AI:
In 2004, Jobs underwent surgery to remove the cancer from his pancreas. It has been reported that he delayed surgery for up to nine months post-diagnosis. During that time, Jobs attempted to treat his cancer using altern
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Sorry for the misspelled words: "knew", "life" and "choose" (and any other I missed).
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Regardless of the minor or secondary issues, which are overblown - the coming elections will decide whether US will keep moving forward with science, making live for everyone better, or backwards banning RNA vaccines technology, scientific reasoning and established theories
Actually Trump is in favor of vaccination because he considers mRNA his legacy, even though his supporters are not. The anti-science uystopia you describe would be what we would get under RFK, who supports the anti-science elements of both the left and the right. He would lead us straight into the Stone Age.
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Actually Trump is in favor of vaccination because he considers mRNA his legacy
True, although that is a weirdly narcissistic to take about a technology that been developed over the past 30 years.
We've entered a new era of medicine in which solutions that would have taken years of trial and error to find can be *engineered*. Moderna famously had its vaccine designed with in days of the virus genome being leaked/published, well before anyone in the administration had even heard of "mRNA". The Trump adminsitration FDA deserves credit for allowing expedited clinical testing, but really
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Well said - It's not the color of a suit but the character and integrity a politician should be measured by.
Considering politics dependence on corporate money, and the concentrated ownership of media it might be too late, the boulder might have already been rolling down the hill, however it's up to the people to derail it by exercising their democratic rights in an informed and wise way to avoid dystopian future of corrupted hidden oligarchy presenting itself as either religious nationalism or "freedom" in
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True, although that is a weirdly narcissistic to take about a technology that been developed over the past 30 years.
Though Trump was as weirdly narcissistic as they come, all presidents lay claim to developing tech that happens to come to fruition in their term. Remember Richard Nixon claiming the lunar program as he congratulated the astronauts?
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"The anti-science uystopia"
Whats that, a cross between a Utopia and a Dystopia ?
" you describe would be what we would get under
RFK, who supports the anti-science elements of both the left and the right. He would lead us straight into the Stone Age."
In the timeline I come from, RFK was assassinated in 1968.
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In the timeline I come from, RFK was assassinated in 1968.
I'm not alone then, WTF.
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Here is more background on the views of today's RFK from a Republican source which cautions its followers that RFK's anti-science stands did not begin with the Covid vaccines. He was one of the original leftist antivaxers, starting with that infamous retracted Wakefield paper. And he not only takes the traditional antinuclear stand of the ideological left, but also opposes the largest renewable, hydro, and even wind farms.
And oh yes, he is also an election denier.
https://www.washingtonexaminer... [washingtonexaminer.com]
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Yes, he takes credit for anything popular and distances himself from anything unpopular - many politicians and celebrities do to various degrees - the party lines are not that important I think, but respectful and civilized dialog, debates and keeping/making politics dependent on voters not donors. Lot's of things are unfortunately distorted (or amplified) by media biases - I hope for some law preventing concentration of the media ownership similar to the corporate antitrust one, also we should call out pol
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His treatment was highly specious, not specialized, although that's certainly the kind of thing people say when they are receiving "alternative" "treatment".
Ironically I actually believe in the idea of alternative treatments, when they make some kind of sense. Hoxsey had a nigh-100% effective skin cancer cure, for example, and you can supposedly still get the treatments in Mexico or something. His treatments were only middling effective against other cancers, but he never claimed otherwise. But juice fasts
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Hoxsey absolutely claimed that his treatment worked on other cancers, and he submitted his claims to the National Cancer Institute, which found them to lack evidence. What evidence was there sometimes did not include any actual evidence of cancer.
When Hoxsey was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he used his treatment on himself. When it failed, he used the normal recommended treatment and surgery and lived another seven years.
Hoxsey was a quack, his treatments were ineffective, and he scammed thousands of peo
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Hoxsey absolutely claimed that his treatment worked on other cancers
He claimed that it worked on other cancers some of the time, not all of the time. That's a relevant detail you seem to have decided it was a good idea to leave out.
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Hoxsey was a quack, his treatments were ineffective,
A guy inventing a treatment, and using it on himself, is by definition not a quack.
It was unsuccessful? He realized it and took more established treatment? Obviously not a quack.
and he scammed thousands of people out of millions of dollars while potentially shortening their lives.
No idea about that. Don't know the guy. Perhaps he just was a scammer?
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Many of the newer treatments are custom-tailored and direct-injected, which is also why you'll see a lot of progress is being made on cancers in the form of solid tumours... less on anything that's metastasized.
I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Wonder if they reject that one, too, when they have pancreatic cancer.
For those that don't know, pancreatic cancer is the ultimate bitch of cancers. Not only will most patients first rejoice of the symptoms (hey, weight loss is great, and mostly because you have no appetite so you don't get hungry, hurray!), and most of the other symptoms are too embarrassing or not interesting enough (dark urine, light stool) by the time most people even consult a doctor (i.e. when the back pain gets unbearable), not only will they first be treated for the wrong (for back pain and diabetes), by the time they finally get some relevant treatment, it's usually too late to do jack shit.
And by then, if you have a gun, the pain will make you seriously consider ending it.
You don't even have to worry about the vaccine giving you blood clots and insane fatigue. You already have both.
And then I'd like to hear their reasoning why they won't want it. Or rather, and way more likely, why they want this one when that whole "RNA vaccine baaaaaad" spiel is still littering their Twitter account.
Re:I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
Wonder if they reject that one, too, when they have pancreatic cancer.
The anti-vaxxers crowd will justify it by saying pancreatic cancer is treatable and detectable, and going down that path is safer than Big Pharma (TM) autism causing clot-shots pushed on us by the deep state.
Never underestimate just how deep the mental rot runs in some of these people. I can't find it right now but I remember reading a story a few years ago from a mother whose kid died from measles and who still steadfastly believes she did the right thing because she was worried her kid may get autism. I can't recall exactly but I'm sure the word "God" came up in the article too.
Re: I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:4, Interesting)
If it keeps me from developing that cancer? I'd probably say yes. I've seen what that cancer is like, and I sure as all hell wouldn't want to have a part of that.
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If it keeps this bitch from returning, I'm just as fine by that. pancreatic cancer has a tendency to come back with a vengeance, even after operation and all.
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How quick you are to conflate anti-vax with anti-mandate.
I didn't conflate anything. The anti-vaxxers are universally anti-mandate too.
Imagine the government coming around saying you should have these anti-pancreatic drugs whether you have the cancer or not.
Am I imagining only the cancer? Because I very much grew up in a country where where it was mandatory for myself to be vaccinated to qualify for all sorts of common government programs. And given the impact of virus on people who can't be vaccinated I can only imagine what a wonderful world we would live in if the government mandated stupid people out of their own stupidity.
Oh, and you have no recourse because they were given immunity from lawsuits.
Shit happens. The net benefit to society outweigh the cos
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I agree with A/C, even though he was modded "Flamebait". I don't care.
The need to put labels on people (thinking: anti-vax) in order to vilify them is pathetic. Could it be that things are more complicated than A) Good B) Bad? I had two shots of Moderna. Regretted it, and didn't get any booster. I got vaxxed for something else more recently though, of my own free will. And I'm against forcing people. Am I an anti-vaxxer?
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Am I an anti-vaxxer?
No, you're just letting dogma cloud logical thinking.
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I had two shots of Moderna. Regretted it, and didn't get any booster.
Why did you regret it? Really wish you'd gotten Covid so you could commiserate with your peers?
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Re: I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're drawing conclusions pretty fast without knowing my personal circumstances. Not sure how you do that.
"your mild Covid case could have easily been NOT MILD AT ALL". I was about to say that this is a true statement. But your "easily" suggests you're taking a probabilistic approach. So I have to disagree. For my age and health, it would have been very unlikely to not get a mild case. Not a certainty, but very unlikely.
"The antivaxxers? Some of them are now dead." This one is a true statement. Not sure wh
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Since you’re splitting hairs, I’ll revise my words and just say that there’s a small but nontrivial chance that the discrepancy between what you say and what you did is why you’re still breathing. Play whatever semantics you want. In
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I agree with you re the "small but nontrivial chance". That's the reward part. The part that seems to be totally absent from your argument though is the risk.
Some people split hairs. Some people think in absolutes. I like to think of myself somewhere in the middle. Ask yourself where you want to be and why. I won't judge.
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It’s worth noting that while you TALK like an anti-vaxxer, you actually DID the smart thing and took the first two jabs
Do I talk like an anti vaxxer? As I said, I recently got an elective (non-covid) vaccine. Is that what an anti-vaxxer does? I probably did some vaccines you didn't do (by virtue of having needed them for travel to exotic countries). Does that make *you* an anti-vaxxer? How about you stop judging people based on what you think you might know about them. I'm trying to act the most responsibly that I can, for me and the ones around me, with the information set that I have at the time of decision making. I don'
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It was not a joke.
It was a genuine question why you regretted it.
I got 2 shots BioNTech, and got Covid about 1 year later.
Now I have two post covid syndroms.
No idea how I would be if I was not vaccinated ...
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but combination of adverse reaction
I had COVID if given the choice right now I'd take your adverse reaction blindly without even knowing what it was. It was *THAT BAD*. I'm young, healthy, and a loner without much human contact, the very model of a "low risk" person. COVID fucked me up royally for about 6 months. Unless you ended up literally in hospital from your reaction to the COVID shot your risk-reward is clouded by ignorance of consequence of both options.
You don't get to counter the commiseration joke with your "mild case", you can be
Re: I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't consider you one, no. But my understanding is that roughly 20% of Americans believe there are microchips inside of covid vaccines. Into the Anti-Vaxxer box they go! I've also stuffed people into that box after they've told me it's better to die than get a vaccine, that God does not want us to get vaccines, or that vaccines cause autism.
I'm not against people thinking for themselves. I'm not against people being able to decide what to put into their bodies. I'm against ignorance masquerading as independent thought. I'm against encouraging people not to treat their diseases with modern medicine, especially when the reasons given are obviously false.
That's the real anti-vaxxer label. It says "Don't listen to me, there's not even a small chance that my ideas are right. They will needlessly hurt you." If someone has put that label on you then I'm sorry. It's a common thing that people do, thinking that everyone who disagrees with them must be idiots. But sometimes they ARE idiots, and dangerous ones at that, and it's important to be able to distinguish between the two.
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"But my understanding is that roughly 20% of Americans believe there are microchips inside of covid vaccines"
So my take is 20% might say they believe that. But I think much fewer do actually believe that. The way I explain it (and this is pure conjecture from my end), is this fringe of the population, loosely speaking, sees saying stupid shit as a way to give the middle finger to elites that have forgotten them and never do anything for them (think Romney's 47% or Hillary's deplorables). I'm not saying it's
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Do you have any children? Mandates have been in place for decades that children enrolling in school must have a number of vaccines. Before covid some localities were actually passing religiou exemptions to pander to their nutjob voter base.
Measles has been an ongoing problem in the Orthodox Jewish community. https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/a... [nyc.gov] This craziness is not isolated to the US either. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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How quick you are to conflate anti-vax with anti-mandate. Imagine the government coming around saying you should have these anti-pancreatic drugs whether you have the cancer or not. Oh, and the side effects are unknown.
Pancreatic cancer is not a pandemic ripping through populations at the speed of coughs and sneezes.
Imagine Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (Score:2)
Imagine the government coming around saying you should have these anti-pancreatic drugs whether you have the cancer or not. Oh, and the side effects are unknown....
Imagine the anti-vaxxers learning a bit about science and doing a simple but realistic risk-benefit analysis and then deciding that vaccines are worth it after all. It's easy to imagine lots of things that are never going to happen. There would be no point in recommending that everyone take the vaccine until the side effects were understood and that there was proof that it actually protected against future development of pancreatic cancer because without that there would be no evidence that there was a net
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Anecdotally, there was also a really large crossover between the anti-mask crowd and the anti-vax crowd. I knew a few anti-vax people who masked and tested all the time i
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How quick you are to conflate anti-vax with anti-mandate.
How were they different? From my perspective, the anti-mandate crowd were loudly screaming how anyone who chose a vaccine were "sheeple".
Imagine the government coming around saying you should have these anti-pancreatic drugs whether you have the cancer or not.
1) You do know that the purpose of a vaccine is to prevent someone from getting a diseases right? It seems like you do not understand this point. 2) Smallpox, polio are just two of the many vaccines that have prevented made there diseases rare if not extinct.
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Mandates created anti-vaxxers.
Anti-vaxxers were around long before COVID. For example there are people that insist autism is caused by vaccines despite all evidence saying otherwise.
When the state pisses away its legitimacy by doing something stupid it is always society that suffers as a result.
In the wake of a highly communicable disease that can be prevented by a vaccine, calling the remedy "stupid" underlies your bias.
Governance is fundamentally not about good or bad, right and wrong, ideal or suboptimal. It's about what society is willing to accept.
That is a very idiotic stance. Some societies accept slavery even today. Some societies accept different forms of discrimination. Some societies accept honor as a reasonable excuse for murder.
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Imagine the government coming around saying you should have these anti-pancreatic drugs whether you have the cancer or not.
And why would any government do that? Everyone - except you dumbass - knows that an anti pancreas cancer "vaccine" does not work that way.
Oh, and the side effects are unknown. One can hardly imagine that they are more server than dying a miserable death from pancreas cancer.
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An autistic kid means work. A dead kid doesn't. Simple logic.
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Re:I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case there is no reason for a mandate. It's not like you can spread pancreatic cancer to everyone around you.
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The real dumbasses are the fascists who advocate you shouldnt have a choice and would coerce you to take a drug.
Cool, now do abortion and recreational drugs.
Fucktard
Classy.
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Fucktard
Classy.
The same kind of users that bitch about their karma being in the toilet. Or oft wonder aloud as to why their posts are "automatically" (sometimes unfairly) modded into oblivion.
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Look in the mirror. You think anti-vax and anti-mandate are the same thing. The real dumbasses are the fascists who advocate you shouldnt have a choice and would coerce you to take a drug. Those are the dangerous people we really should purge from our society. Not the cautious people who want to evaluate the risks / rewards and decide for themselves. Fucktard.
Well, I guess we have *an* answer if not *the* answer we were looking for. That escalated unsurprisingly quickly.
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Sure sounds like a treatment to me.
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I'd guess it would be combined with the ability to predict whether you'll get it [theregister.com].
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There is a rather large difference between a disease with a 95% death rate and one with a 99.7% survival rate. The important part is the risk to benefit ratio.
Re:I want to see the anti-vax crowd reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
Survival... yeah, but with a 80% chance of lasting effects [nih.gov].
When you've seen someone suffering from long Covid, you know that survival is only half the deal.
Only Impacts One Person (Score:2)
Wonder if they reject that one, too, when they have pancreatic cancer.
Who cares? Pancreatic cancer is not a transmissible disease so, unlike the Covid vaccine, if you refuse to take it then you are the only person whom your stupidity will harm.
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Provided you're not some snakeoil peddler who convinces people to not get it because your (insert useless pseudomedicine here) is far superior.
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Wonder if they reject that one, too, when they have pancreatic cancer.
For those that don't know, pancreatic cancer is the ultimate bitch of cancers. Not only will most patients first rejoice of the symptoms (hey, weight loss is great, and mostly because you have no appetite so you don't get hungry, hurray!), and most of the other symptoms are too embarrassing or not interesting enough (dark urine, light stool) by the time most people even consult a doctor (i.e. when the back pain gets unbearable), not only will they first be treated for the wrong (for back pain and diabetes), by the time they finally get some relevant treatment, it's usually too late to do jack shit.
This reads like the website of one of those fusion startups espousing the benefits of clean limitless energy. The issue of course was never over the value of such products. It is entirely whether or not you have a feasible product that actually works.
And then I'd like to hear their reasoning why they won't want it. Or rather, and way more likely, why they want this one when that whole "RNA vaccine baaaaaad" spiel is still littering their Twitter account.
In this particular case overall evidence is fairly weak to draw any firm conclusions. Low numbers, no control group and a third of participants were excluded from study post surgery due to cancer progression raising obvious issues of bias.
I'll also point out
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Given that the 5 year prognosis of pancreatic cancer is in the vicinity of 10-15%, I'd say if I had the choice of taking this stuff or hoping for the best, I'll roll up my sleeve.
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They'll reject anything that doesn't have them feel superior to others. They're directly stupid - they're diet narcissists. They need secret knowledge 'nobody else' knows about. It has them feel above us sheep.
You can fight fire with fire though. A successful campaign by my local doctor had them lay out all their reasons for rejecting the vaccine, then pull them into a side room, have them turn off their phone and the Drs phone. He would then tell them russian and china were engaging in pysop to sow distrus
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Our brain is a curious thing in that regard. When we learn something new, it releases endorphins. Yes, learning is fun for our brain. Which makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary point of view because our ability to learn and thwart problems with intellect is pretty much what keeps us alive in a nature that is generally faster, stronger, better armed and tougher than we are, and that is out to eat us.
Unfortunately our brain can't differentiate between learning something that is true and learning some sor
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Why was it worth mentioning in the article... (Score:1, Troll)
The most readily apparent answer would be that the author thinks race always matters. Which is racism.
Re:Why was it worth mentioning in the article... (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps because Black Americans get pancreatic cancer at the highest rate of all ethnic groups. To quote:
"Black Americans are more likely to get pancreatic cancer than any other racial or ethnic group. They have the highest incidence rate of pancreatic cancer in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute SEER data"
So, that suggests that there are some important race differences, and that the study used the group that isn't most affected.
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Race does matter here due to differing rates of cancer between different races. However, it really doesnt matter in the fact this was a study of 16 individuals prove the worth of a much larger study involving multiple races and income levels, male vs female, etc.
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The small study gives good advice to continue with studies. That is all.
Not sure how many people have pancreas cancer at a given time, and survive after surgery long enough to get into a study.
It seems a bit difficult to get a sample size which is much bigger, don't you think so?
BTW: the likelihood that a roulette wheel comes up 16 times in a row with the same number is somewhere in the range of 1 divided by the number of atoms in the universe. You did not really pick a good example.
Patrick Swayze (Score:1)
Why is this a vaccine? (Score:2)
My understanding of the biology is that disease enters body, body fights against it, analyzes it, creates anti-bodies. Depending on the disease and the body, the body either manages to fight the disease off or not. If it is successful, it remembers the blueprints to the antibodies for next time. Some blueprints are remembered longer than others.
A vaccine would introduce the disease in a way to make it way easier for the body to fight it. Either the blueprints to the antibodies are introduce directly as with
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It was my impression that you cannot vaccinate an already diseased body.
Of course you can.
It just does not help when a huge deal of your body cells is already invaded by a virus. Because: usually the immune system is then already doing its job.
In case of cancer however: the immune system does not really realize it should prepare a full scale war. Giving a vaccine now, especially *after* surgery will get the immune system on its toes. And will prepare it to fight any survivors that are now trying to mount a
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I'd call it a treatment...
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But it is not.
So why call it that way?
it does not treat anything.
Hard Cancer to Run Trials (Score:3)
Other posters have mentioned how bad pancreatic cancer is, but one thing for people to know is that it can kill extremely quick once it is detected. Many don't even live long enough to get into a study. My mother in law (a healthy active woman in her early 70s) was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late November 2021. She had no symptoms at all until early November, which was just fatigue and then a little jaundice. Her doctor originally thought she had hepatitis. By the first week of December, her lungs were filling up with fluid to the point she could barely breathe. Couldn't even make it to her intake appointment at the famous cancer hospital in own. She was gone by Christmas after barely doing a single course of chemo.
So for people to be enrolled in a study, they already are the folks who had a less aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. The worst type gets you too quick for even that.