Not sure why this is all that interesting to HN. It's a very early trial and the outcome is "encouraging".
Other than a proof of concept that it might work, there is nothing here.
More than proof of concept if they went with such a statement to the press. Also, ongoing Phase 1/2 means that by 5-10 years this therapy may become commercial, the initial target being refractory/relapsing tumours as stated in the announcement. It may take some time for the therapeutic target population to be expanded, but this is not a minimal achievement.
My view is that this being an autologous therapy (the patient's very own leucocytes are being engineered: the entire manufacturing cycle [I speculate 30-50 days] is done for just a single patient), this will be very expensive and probably only covered on an insurance basis in certain countries only. Still better than nothing, and even science has to make money. The real breakthrough will be arriving to heterologous therapies, where healthy donors leucocytes can be engineered and administered to any patient.
If people die due to your inaction, you are not liable.
If people die due to your actions, you very much are.
Even a minor issue can end up being harmful. If you have a cancer treatment that's safe and effective, but you haven't fully vetted it and it turns out to be less effective than another available option, then your drug would cause harm.
It's safer to test these things, otherwise you get sued, go to jail, your company folds, and nobody gets cancer treatments anymore.
Right now, only those very rich have that chance, they pay the pharma companies (and a host of outright quacks)... I'd love to see cancer medication being accessible for everyone, no matter the amount of money on their bank account.
We need some process to distinguish between what works and what doesn't work.
The question isn't merely "how quickly can we get this one thing to market" it's "how can we prove that it works as quickly and cheaply as possible, without biasing us to treatments that don't actually work, and with giving all options their proper due."
For a while in machine learning there was a field called "active learning" (might still be ongoing?) that was all about how to choose the most informative questions to ask to learn as quickly as possible.
We face that same question with cancer therapies. Every patien that is on one trial can not be on a trial for a different therapy, so that's one limited resource for how quickly we can learn. But the other limited resource is of course how much we want to spend on validating therapies versus deploying existing, working therapies to a broader group of humans.
Also something showing positive results in humans. So many things have been cured in mice, but don't translate.
I'm going to ESMO and this would be interesting but certainly not the highlight of the data releases.
Don't get me wrong, this may turn out to be very exciting, but it's very early data, and similar to other development programs has a 90% chance of failing.
“BNT211 continues to show encouraging antitumor activity in patients with CLDN6-positive relapsed or refractory advanced solid tumors” <- interesting because they finally demo some effect in solid tumors in humans
“Follow-up of efficacy data at 1x108 CAR-T cells with or without CARVac shows an overall response rate (“ORR”) of 59% and a disease control rate (“DCR”) of 95%, with the CARVac cohort demonstrating a prolonged persistence of CAR-T cells” <- interesting because those are high response rate. Let’s hope it lasts and they can increase those rates but as a patient, you would take this.
reason i thought to ask that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37996164
Whatever we can do to treat the various cancers out there, the better it is for humanity. I'd much rather have money flow in this that in the next financial / crypto scam.