We keep thinking we have a lock on curing cancer, but it continues to be very elusive.
As I understand it, using automation to "debug" individual cancers is scalable. That is, reading a cancer, adapting to it, and creating a vaccine is something that can be done with increasing levels of detail as automation increases.
So if they only show a 1% improvement, it's a strategy definitely worth continuing. This is very much like the hacker who keeps playing around with a broken method until it works -- only it's all automated. It very well may be that we "learn" how to contain/control many cancers without having a traditional understanding of them at all. Fascinating approach, and much different from previous forays. Watch this space. Given the history, my money says it's still going to be a long, hard slog -- perhaps decades, but still, a promising approach.
The reason it seems like everything causes cancer is because everyone is at risk for cancer. Living is a cancer risk. A lot of people don't die from cancer because they don't live long enough, but prevention will never happen. Cancer is inevitable.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
There's a huge downside to that: "Lets see if drop tables works... oops."
I'm not sure if this thinking is only something from mixed metaphors or is applicable to what they're doing.
There is definitely a huge buzz going through Roswell's campus regarding this.
Here is the publicly available information regarding this particular Phase I study.
I'm a programmer in Buffalo, NY. I always check Roswell's "Available Careers" and they always have to same two Programmer Analyst postings.
Do you have a chance to use cool technologies there? The postings mention JSP/VB/blah.
I'd love to send in a resume to support meaningful work.
Roswell is run similarly to a college campus (I've had previous experience supporting NY State colleges), meaning there are many departments, each run fairly independently of each other and each with different technical needs.
The departments usually fall in one of three categories: there is an educational group that works with UB's medical campus, a clinical component that treats patients, and obviously a heavy research component. During my time here, there have been at least four startups/companies that have formed as a result of research I've helped support.
Roswell currently has about 3,300+ employees. The Programmer/Analyst positions you have seen are an attempt to fill needed positions in various departments.
Everyone's version of "cool technologies" is different. I'm of the opinion, for the most part, whatever gets the job done thoroughly and accurately works.
In the past nine years I've written and maintain about 20+ applications in VBscript, C#, Actionscript, PHP, Ruby, etc with the various associated frameworks. Since every department requires something slightly different I've had to adapt as needed. However, recently we've been running with an inhouse PHP framework called Surebert which was/is written by a co-worker.
Interestingly enough for me, I've never written anything professionally in Java, but a lot of my co-workers have.
Out of the five of us on the web team, I'm the Apple fanboy. So I'm on a MacBook, iPhone, etc. Another one is on Fedora, another is using a Dell (ugh). To each their own.
And Roswell lets me moonlight on the side. I've had fairly steady freelancing gigs for a couple years now.
Interesting place to work. Good people. Very little complaints (nothing's perfect).
Some great things are happening in Buffalo/Roswell, this is just one of the more vocal discoveries worthy of attention. I truly hope this trial continues on successfully as the PIs (principal investigators) envision.
On a personal note, I find it mildly entertaining to say that "I code to cure cancer". It is an honor to support incredibly smart people working to eradicate such a horrible array of diseases.
There's piece about his fight in recent Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-patient...
http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/TreatmentsandSideEffects/Cli...
In other words, this is not news. There are probably hundreds of similar clinical trials every year.
Definitive efficacy is established in a phase III trial, along with safety.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research
This trial is news-worthy for a few reasons. One is that the only documented cases of cure of a disseminated cancer are proabably all due to an immune-mediated attack (exceptions are lymphomas and testicular cancers which can be cured with chemotherapy even if widespread). Vaccines are trying to exploit this mechanism. Another reason is that most of the treatments we use in phase I trials are poorly understood. The treatment employed in this study however utilises a pretty simple and elegant approach - find something that only cancer cells have, then try and bait the immune system with it.
I really hope this vaccine will be available and effective when her tumor grows back.
More info on Provenge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipuleucel-T
