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0 pointsfrognumber2y ago0 comments

Cancer is a mutation. Much of the most promising recent work I've read on therapies focuses on:

1) Understanding the specific mutations

2) Helping the immune system find way to identify, and therefore attack, those specific cancer cells

More of the work focuses on t-cells, but otherwise, it's not too dissimilar from the work on infections.

I should know better than to discuss medicine on a SWE forum. Every post here starts with an insult. Not a single post contains any technical detail, nor even clues that people even understand the words I'm using (t-cell, MHC, etc.). It's like arguing with a cross between a five-year-old and a teenager who knows better.

I think I'm done here. There is no point.

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supermatt2y ago· 2 in thread

You may be done here, but you are still misunderstanding the medicine. You are making exactly the same errors as mentioned in the article - generalisation.

Cancer is not "a" mutation, and that is the whole problem.

You are talking about personalised neoantigen-specific t-cells as a generic cure for cancer, while ignoring the fact that not all generations of a cancer express neoantigens, or even the same neoantigens.

Ergo, it is a therapy, NOT a cure.

frognumberOP2y ago

Gosh. You're right. To solve that, we'd need something which could somehow predict the overall set of neoantigens present from the sequences of a few branches of a cancer, and not only that, to be able to rapidly adapt therapies to the antigens present. It sounds like we'd need some kind of algorithm which can do very complex pattern-matching and generalizations.

I can't imagine us ever coming up with something to help us with the fact I'm ignoring. It totally doesn't sound like the sort of thing deep learning would be at all good at.

/sarc

supermatt2y ago

> "I can't imagine us ever coming up with something to help us with the fact I'm ignoring"

That fact you are ignoring is the whole point about why engineered t-cells cant be a cure. No neoantigens means nothing to target. And your solution is to just wave your hands and say "deep learning will figure it out"...

You truly are a clown.

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