??? About immunotherapy and cancer

[LineMedic]

I remember watching a few different TED talks regarding customized immunotherapy treatments regarding cancer of different types. If you're not sure what I mean, a quick YouTube search will yield a plethora of videos about it.

From the presentations it seems as though this therapy is way more effective so why isn't being implemented more broadly across the medical field?

Am I just uninformed and it is being more widely used, or is it just still in its infancy?

With CRISPER tech now becoming available, I think it's exciting that we may be on the verge of curing these and other catastrophic diseases.

Any thoughts?


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[deleted343839]

There is a lot of enthusiasm but it's too early to know where immunotherapy will fit in the big scheme of things. A lot of the work is still in trials and pre-clinical studies. For some diseases like melanoma, the newer immunotherapies are a game changer. For others, who knows yet. There is a long list of sometimes-useful treatments that were at some point in history the next big thing, but ultimately fell far short of "the cure."

When you're done watching the TED talks, roll up your sleeves and dive into the peer-reviewed literature. Pro tip: know the difference between "clinical response," "progression-free survival," and "overall survival."

 

[LineMedic]

Will definitely look into those and thanks for the heads up. And thanks for the tip.

While I'm at it is there anything else that you could suggest looking into that would be interesting?


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[eteshoe]

Start with some reading of journals such as Science Translational Medicine, Nature Reviews Cancer & Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, NEJM - plus medscape, wikipedia, Google

It's good that you're interested but you need to catch up on a lot of literature to understand what's been done, current problems, shortcomings of current therapies, potential future pharmacological/immunological targets, etc.

Review: basic pharmacology, clinical trial design, how different cancers are classified by histological and pathological stages, current immunotherapies, classes of chemotherapeutics.

 

[LineMedic]

Thanks that's a lot of good info will be checking it out!! Cheers


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