They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.)
The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years.
> Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:
>> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"
> PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.
I think you overestimate the "interesting enough period". How much would it be worth for some patients to go into remission for a year? or even 6 months? The answer is a lot
In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).
Yeah, with a movie like that in his credits, it seems a miracle he was ever selected to be James Bond. His radar for picking great movies was equally bad as it was good.
Very cool research. They just injected mice with 45 different bacterial strains, and then isolated and cultivated the ones that had the best performance. It seems that it might be quite easy to cultivate these strains to target different tumors / specific tumor samples.
Ewingella Americana itself is a quite common bacterial species, but it seems that the effective strain is the frog-derived and cultivated one. So don't go injecting yourself with a random E. Americana.
I owned a riding mower once. Mice built nests in the engine, blocking enough of the air cooling to result in overheating and blowing the main seal. After fixing that twice I got in the habit of removing enough of the shroudy bits to expose and remove the nests. That took as long as actually mowing the lawn. After a season of that I gave the mower away and now we pay a neighbor to cut the grass. We did consider trying to mouseproof the shed or the mower itself, but we are either too busy or too lazy, depending on who you ask. My long term (probably fantasy) solution is a robotic mower - but we have not much budget for it, are chronically absentee and the property has a lot of odd strips of discontinuous turf.
EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.
Wrapping your wiring harness in capsaicin tape works pretty well. Unfortunately, this is a discovery I made after multiple annoying and expensive repairs.
Hmm, mice get much impressive medical results to be linked to here and there, but overall it’s not certain the species benefit that much in happiness and fulfilment.
Definitely changing, I'm not so sure about destroying. Your house displaced an ecosystem so you could live there but I bet in your ethical system that's fine right? What a surprise
We get what we deserve. We let the top 1% destroy our planet and also let them live the longest in their bunkers, while we deal with the repercussions of not having done enough.
But I've noticed that folks on HN are very very fond of capitalism, so it's no point arguing against it on here and on the effects of wealth accumulation and greed.
The distribution here is bimodal. There are plenty of Elon-shilling exploit the solar system types, but also plenty of skeptical types who see all the futurism bullshit as a lever to maintain control.
The alternatives to capitalism are a wide spectrum, ranging from totalitarian dictatorship (aka central planning) all the way to free markets with sensible regulations. What they all have in common is not being capitalism, i.e. not putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest.
Unregulated capitalism does not exist anywhere on this planet, and the US is in fact quite a bureaucratic country, though less so than many others.
"putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest."
Do you think it is? Then let some of the wealthiest try to obtain a permit in downtown SF for a mere block of flats, the likes of which used to be built by the thousands 100 years ago. If it takes less than a decade, I would be surprised.
There is a lot of power outside the private sector. Every environmental or political group that sues any project does, in fact, wield a lot of power of the "veto" variety, which used to be prerogative of kings.
Most humans would prefer hiding in a bunker to burning.
And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.
Cannot judge this before knowing what world's problems is that particular
person intending to solve.
There are people who fervently believe that the world's problems are caused by something like international Jewry or lack of sufficient religiosity or existence of democracy. I fervently hope that they don't get to succeed in their solutions.
Resource exploitation and destruction of ecosystems are direct results of capitalism and greed and neglect. I stopped bringing up arguments against capitalism on here generally due to the sheer amount of people in privileged circumstances that wouldn't change a thing about their ways. Also doesn't help that people in tech often times have no sense of empathy whatsoever, so its no use to argue about this on here.
The grandparent of your post, however, blamed capitalism for the destruction of the environment, as though other economic systems would not do the same. So your comment isn't really that relevant if the parent to your post is just offering a counterexample. I get it, you don't like capitalism, but jumping every time capitalism is mentioned--particularly when your point isn't really relevant--doesn't really win others to your side.
The so-called socialist economies were just the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
Weird: the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
This line from your article stood out: "It was typical to use natural resources extensively without considering the effects on the environment."
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
so if it's socialism/communism destroying the environment it's a mistake. but if it's capitalism it's by design?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
Those things have also happened under other forms of economic structure, such as feudalism and communism. In fact there's no point in human history when we weren't manipulating the environment for our gain, destroying some species and promoting others in the process, we just got better at it over time. It's sort of an inevitability given we are megafauna who take a lot of resources per human to live, and there are an awful lot of us.
Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.
Go forth, repent and flagellate yourself while we work at improving the future. Also, don't believe everything Greta & her ilk say. You may have noticed that she jumped off the climate train to hop on the gaza-boat? Perpetually unhappy people looking for a cause to keep their minds off their unbearable lack of a sense of purpose are not the ones you should seek out for counsel.
In other words, why react in such a dour way to an interesting discovery?
Certainly lots could be said here, but first and foremost its more than a little weird to be so fixated on that Greta girl like this.. You should really, like, work on making your point without bringing her up maybe? Maybe try writing two sentences not talking about her and go from there? I am not sure you appreciate how much it takes away from you point... Like, oh no, are you going to say something bad about Al Gore next? I will be devestated...
While we are at it: whats with the antiquated parlance? Are we playing DnD right now?
I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered?
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
Humans can go very far in exploring all kind of variation in whatever craze they get addicted to, all the more if they get all the room and resources to do so.
The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human
The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.
AGI is clearly right around the corner. It might not be able to make an accurate diagram of a cancer research study but it’s gonna cure cancer in no time…
~~I wouldn't be so sure about "clearly". We're still very squarely in the "fancy auto-complete" stage of "AI", the name of which I still consider more branding than reality.~~
Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"
The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate
Yep, I found that one too - this paper <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/> assumes immunocompetent mice, while the sepsis one was in a patient who was immunocompromised (both by the cancer and by chemo).
Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.
As in 99.9% of cases of people who rush to the comments desperate to post a link to xkcd because, erm, actually I dunno. Why the hell do half the threads on HN have someone desperately posting an unrelated xkcd?
Sure thing! Plenty of possibilities here for instance: 'Bioactive Compounds in Ficus Fruits, Their Bioactivities, and Associated Health Benefits: A Review'. (It's a pretty extensive list).
Previus discussion (from the university press release) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 (498 points | 6 months ago | 140 comments) I'll rehash my comment
They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.)
The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years.
There is also and old comment by octaane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308732 I'll quote it partially:
> Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote:
>> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)"
> PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive.
> Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo.
> [...]
> and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans
More like, what's a mouse gonna do about it?
I think you overestimate the "interesting enough period". How much would it be worth for some patients to go into remission for a year? or even 6 months? The answer is a lot
I kid you not, there was a movie with Sean Connery called "Medicine Man" (1992) with this exact same theme.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=fn_t_1
In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).
I've seen the movie several times. In Italian, the title was translated simply as Mato Grosso, which makes it oddly geographically specific. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Connery definitely starred in even weirder movies. Have you seen Zardoz?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmI2NjI2OWYtMzU5NS00...
>For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre
Buddy, if you're trying to tell me it's weirder than Darby O'Gill and the Little People, I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail.
You're the man now, dog!
Yeah, with a movie like that in his credits, it seems a miracle he was ever selected to be James Bond. His radar for picking great movies was equally bad as it was good.
He had to pay his bills
> I am going to need more than Sir Connery in a ponytail
Check out Zardoz: Connery with a ponytail, a pistol in hand, wearing thigh-high boots and a mankini.
And a giant flying stone head that vomits guns.
I am not joking.
Very cool research. They just injected mice with 45 different bacterial strains, and then isolated and cultivated the ones that had the best performance. It seems that it might be quite easy to cultivate these strains to target different tumors / specific tumor samples.
Ewingella Americana itself is a quite common bacterial species, but it seems that the effective strain is the frog-derived and cultivated one. So don't go injecting yourself with a random E. Americana.
Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2...
rest of the site has the usual "cooker" insane brainrot ivermectin, etc crap
To give more credit to this blog post, the NIH published findings on this same subject last year.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/
Doesn’t that simply make this blog spam?
Mice are having a great year
To be honest, they are pretty cute, they don't deserve cancer.
Spoken like someone who has never had to rebuild a generator or find out the hard way car wiring is mainly soy-based nowadays.
I owned a riding mower once. Mice built nests in the engine, blocking enough of the air cooling to result in overheating and blowing the main seal. After fixing that twice I got in the habit of removing enough of the shroudy bits to expose and remove the nests. That took as long as actually mowing the lawn. After a season of that I gave the mower away and now we pay a neighbor to cut the grass. We did consider trying to mouseproof the shed or the mower itself, but we are either too busy or too lazy, depending on who you ask. My long term (probably fantasy) solution is a robotic mower - but we have not much budget for it, are chronically absentee and the property has a lot of odd strips of discontinuous turf.
EDIT: we did revert about 50% of the lawn to native wetland/prairie and we aim to raise that number over time.
Wrapping your wiring harness in capsaicin tape works pretty well. Unfortunately, this is a discovery I made after multiple annoying and expensive repairs.
"Spoken like"? God I hate rick and Morty that boring show
"Spoken like" was a phrase before Rick and Morty lol they didn't invent the English language.
The ones genetically engineered to get Alzheimer's or the ones engineered to get cancer?
Plot twist, doesn't matter, even the control group is going to be dead soon if it's not already.
Trick question, all lab rodents are so inbred that they get cancer anyway
Century*
Hmm, mice get much impressive medical results to be linked to here and there, but overall it’s not certain the species benefit that much in happiness and fulfilment.
They told me they’re happy enough when I was delivering them cookies.
Did you have milk too? If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for a glass of milk.
The pride and sense of achievement they ought to feel that members of their kind did something should be enough to feel superior though
We are destroying ecosystems so fast that there will be no frogs and we will regret it. The same with all the nature
There will, in fact, continue to be frogs.
One theory of where posts like this come from: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2527316123
> We are destroying ecosystems so fast
Definitely changing, I'm not so sure about destroying. Your house displaced an ecosystem so you could live there but I bet in your ethical system that's fine right? What a surprise
As they say, "there is no ethical consumption." I've done my part by not having any kids.
Following this logic, isn't "your part" undone until you commit suicide?
We get what we deserve. We let the top 1% destroy our planet and also let them live the longest in their bunkers, while we deal with the repercussions of not having done enough. But I've noticed that folks on HN are very very fond of capitalism, so it's no point arguing against it on here and on the effects of wealth accumulation and greed.
The distribution here is bimodal. There are plenty of Elon-shilling exploit the solar system types, but also plenty of skeptical types who see all the futurism bullshit as a lever to maintain control.
Can you help me understand how alternatives to capitalism, such as central planning, would necessarily be better at preserving the planet?
The alternatives to capitalism are a wide spectrum, ranging from totalitarian dictatorship (aka central planning) all the way to free markets with sensible regulations. What they all have in common is not being capitalism, i.e. not putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest.
It's must be so interesting to live regulation free! Where abouts are you from?
Unregulated capitalism does not exist anywhere on this planet, and the US is in fact quite a bureaucratic country, though less so than many others.
"putting power solely in the hands of the wealthiest."
Do you think it is? Then let some of the wealthiest try to obtain a permit in downtown SF for a mere block of flats, the likes of which used to be built by the thousands 100 years ago. If it takes less than a decade, I would be surprised.
There is a lot of power outside the private sector. Every environmental or political group that sues any project does, in fact, wield a lot of power of the "veto" variety, which used to be prerogative of kings.
People here strive to be the ones hiding in the bunkers as the world burns.
Ban AC!
Most humans would prefer hiding in a bunker to burning.
And far better to be hiding, than watching and playing a fiddle from atop some convenient high wall. Or plotting how to destroy your fellow alpha arsonists next.
It would be even better if the world didn't burn.
Yeah, sure, capitalism, 1%, etc. Spoken like a 15yo who just saw some DSA- agitprop on TikTok and is now ready to solve the world's problems.
Solving the world's problems is certainly a more laudable goal than the accumulation of wealth, don't you think?
Cannot judge this before knowing what world's problems is that particular person intending to solve.
There are people who fervently believe that the world's problems are caused by something like international Jewry or lack of sufficient religiosity or existence of democracy. I fervently hope that they don't get to succeed in their solutions.
Just proves my point :)
people are very fond of it here -> there's no point arguing against it here?
Backwards logic. If they're fond of it then they're the people to be arguing against, no?
Resource exploitation and destruction of ecosystems are direct results of capitalism and greed and neglect. I stopped bringing up arguments against capitalism on here generally due to the sheer amount of people in privileged circumstances that wouldn't change a thing about their ways. Also doesn't help that people in tech often times have no sense of empathy whatsoever, so its no use to argue about this on here.
Socialist Russia was an environmental disaster. https://www.gchumanrights.org/preparedness/the-environmental...
There are many things that are not either capitalism or Russia.
The grandparent of your post, however, blamed capitalism for the destruction of the environment, as though other economic systems would not do the same. So your comment isn't really that relevant if the parent to your post is just offering a counterexample. I get it, you don't like capitalism, but jumping every time capitalism is mentioned--particularly when your point isn't really relevant--doesn't really win others to your side.
The so-called socialist economies were just the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
As a child, I experienced the reality of "socialism", where every word used by the ruling elites meant something very different from what it was claimed to mean.
Unfortunately, already for more than a quarter of century USA and most "capitalistic" countries every year become more and more alike to the former socialist countries, from all points of view, like great wealth inequality, markets dominated by quasi-monopolies, non-existent political opposition, mass surveillance of the population, confusing propaganda in all mass-media, less and less chances to afford to truly be the owner of many kinds of things, like houses, cars or computers. If your car or your computer or your smartphone or your TV set do whatever their vendor or the government want, instead of doing what you want, then obviously you are not their owner.
fancy way of saying "communism has never been done properly before."
yeah well that's because the execution matters and turns out when you give people power to choose who gets what, they abuse it. go figure.
Maybe it’s never been done properly cause human nature will never allow it to be, e.g. it’s an ideology that’s incompatible with humanity.
But surely there’s a more sane option than under regulated capitalism with a problematic wealth distribution.
Weird: the environmental disasters under "Socialist Russia" seem to match many of the ones in "Capitalist America". The thing in common between the two seems to be rich oligarchs controlling government, and leveraging their power to extract profits, with little regard given to the proles or the environment.
This line from your article stood out: "It was typical to use natural resources extensively without considering the effects on the environment."
Crazy how much the supposedly "pro-capitalist" right wing mirrors "Socialist Russia" sometimes.
Yes yes socialism also made mistakes so capitalism must be better!!
I lived under both systems.
Yeah, socialism was abandoned precisely because capitalism was better. By the 1980s, residents of Central Europe could quite clearly compare and saw that their western neighbours were richer, healthier and enjoyed cleaner air and water than those of the "Camp of Progress".
Market economy + democracy beats top-down enforced utopian intellectual projects like a Marxist-Leninist state by a difference of a league.
We tried that on our own people so that you don't have to.
so if it's socialism/communism destroying the environment it's a mistake. but if it's capitalism it's by design?
nothing other than the prosperity that capitalism generates is inherently bad for the environment. yeah if you pull people out of poverty their carbon footprint will probably increase. but the alternative is them living in poverty and starving under a communist system (like always)
the amount of goods and services capitalism has generated has saved so many lives. we have huge amounts of excess food we send across the world.
Those things have also happened under other forms of economic structure, such as feudalism and communism. In fact there's no point in human history when we weren't manipulating the environment for our gain, destroying some species and promoting others in the process, we just got better at it over time. It's sort of an inevitability given we are megafauna who take a lot of resources per human to live, and there are an awful lot of us.
Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.
Go forth, repent and flagellate yourself while we work at improving the future. Also, don't believe everything Greta & her ilk say. You may have noticed that she jumped off the climate train to hop on the gaza-boat? Perpetually unhappy people looking for a cause to keep their minds off their unbearable lack of a sense of purpose are not the ones you should seek out for counsel.
In other words, why react in such a dour way to an interesting discovery?
> In other words, why react in such a dour way to an interesting discovery?
Because we're triggering mass extinction events in the name of improving things, that's why.
Oh no, she cares about two pressing issues at the same time! Clearly just a tourist.
Certainly lots could be said here, but first and foremost its more than a little weird to be so fixated on that Greta girl like this.. You should really, like, work on making your point without bringing her up maybe? Maybe try writing two sentences not talking about her and go from there? I am not sure you appreciate how much it takes away from you point... Like, oh no, are you going to say something bad about Al Gore next? I will be devestated...
While we are at it: whats with the antiquated parlance? Are we playing DnD right now?
He should have sprinkled the word Nazi in a few times to modernize it
Great news for mice everywhere.
I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered?
Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"?
There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.
> unpleasant
> happily
I think you answered your own question really, a lot of animals just enjoy eating them (humans included!)
Humans can go very far in exploring all kind of variation in whatever craze they get addicted to, all the more if they get all the room and resources to do so.
maybe your dog is chasing a high from some rare toad mutation...
Never been a better time to be a mouse
Crank blog, very skeptical
Bryan Johnson might be interested in IV’ing frog gut bacteria.
Is Bryan Johnson a mouse with cancer?
Not yet.
How rude! Bryan is no labrat /j
100 years of trying everything to kill bacteria, and we find they can be jolly useful
humanity has been producing useful things from bacteria for thousands of things already.
Cheese!
lager
Yeast are not bacteria, though
Most beer until quite recently was sour from bacteria.
So the Bursar at Unseen University was on to something this whole time? And we all thought was mad!
The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal.
Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent.
So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.
When my mother was fighting cancer, I recall the many disappointments of finding research shrinking tumours in animal models, only to find out the human research showing it didnt work in humans. This was in the 2010s, before llms, but when google search actually searched the web. Then, once you found something that seemed to work in humans, you were hit with the realization that ‘cancer’ is an umbrella term, and you need to account for cell type, and its numerous mutations.. I think the best approach is to collect a sample of the cancer, genotype it, test it against all known anticancer compounds, similar to how you’d deal with a bacterial infection sample, and then hope that the compound that worked for that specific cancer cell will work inside the human
I'm astounded that this thread doesn't contain at least one 'eat the frog' joke.
https://asana.com/resources/eat-the-frog
Because this is HN and not Reddit?
The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.
AGI is clearly right around the corner. It might not be able to make an accurate diagram of a cancer research study but it’s gonna cure cancer in no time…
~~I wouldn't be so sure about "clearly". We're still very squarely in the "fancy auto-complete" stage of "AI", the name of which I still consider more branding than reality.~~
Edit: Ignore me, I'm sleepy and can't read, lol
The person you’re replying to was being glib
Lol! Yep, that's my bad. Too sleepy right now.
How in the world did you miss such obvious sarcasm?
Whoops, lack of sleep, haha.
Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"
Mice are so goddam healthy.
They get all the good medical breakthroughs.
From what I've heard of murine health and life expectancy stats, all those "good medical breakthroughs" aren't actually doing them much good.
Vs. there's a whole lotta of money to be made in mouse medicine.
Symbolic, perhaps?
The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate
Yep, I found that one too - this paper <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/> assumes immunocompetent mice, while the sepsis one was in a patient who was immunocompromised (both by the cancer and by chemo).
Given that many cancer sufferers are immunocompromised, this isn't necessarily a silver bullet, although it is an interesting result.
Sorry but the site looks too sensationalist for me.
Is there any other source?
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.
this one is in mice. I guess we're running in circles now.
Not really the same in this situation though.
As in 99.9% of cases of people who rush to the comments desperate to post a link to xkcd because, erm, actually I dunno. Why the hell do half the threads on HN have someone desperately posting an unrelated xkcd?
It's our Nostradamus Prophecies, just like having an old Star Trek episode for everything that is happening today.
Mice tumors, the scourge of humanity.
Wow, this is humorous .. whats next, the eye of the newt cures wistfulness? I sure hope so.
Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft.
I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..
You might like this episode of Radiolab:
https://radiolab.org/podcast/best-medicine
They followed a 1100 year old medicine recipe and found the resulting salve was effective against MRSA in their test.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6261618/
Sure thing! Plenty of possibilities here for instance: 'Bioactive Compounds in Ficus Fruits, Their Bioactivities, and Associated Health Benefits: A Review'. (It's a pretty extensive list).
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/06ab/f83d30ec00bb902bb1aa37...
lol