I can't bring myself to be in any way happy from reading stuff like this. We get articles like this every freaking day and probably only a fraction of them will ever get into production.
And when we do, it won't be recognizably related to this article, because the pop-sci writer and his headline editor mangled the description so terribly that it bears only a passing resemblance to what the study actually did.
Few early-stage trials make it to market, but that's an entirely different matter. The treatment they developed, and published in a highly regarded journal, almost certainly works as described. That's a very different beast from a treatment that will be effective in humans to the high standards we hold modern drugs to.
No, this is simply not true. Unless you also mean “cures the disease, but kills the patient for some other reason” and other net negative outcomes.
Most of those studies are on tissue samples, or rodent analogs. That’s not the same as live trials and there is no basis for claiming they’d work in situ.
There's further no guarantee that the rat survives, or mates, or becomes emperor of China for that matter. What is reproducible is what is described in the paper, not what you might wish would follow.
Reproducibility is a very specific requirement. It requires that, following the procedure as outlined, you will find similar data. It has nothing to do with application, or utility, or anything else. It is simply that your results, for the same experiment, will be similar.
It started in 1989 and looks like the real deal this time. They have gotten funding and have been growing ever since. Doesn't seem like crap to me:
https://www.tijd.be/ondernemen/farma-biotech/het-bloedspoor-...
Ps. They were on the Belgium stock market as Ablynx
PS2. They got approval of the European Commission