Top doctor remains brain cancer-free after a year

Having a glioma myself (though way less severe than his type), this is exciting news. Brain tumors are often written off as "well, you're done for" and not much progress has been made on the treatment front. Though, the type I have was only discovered in the last 20 years and was lumped (heh) in with others before. Genetic sequencing and gene therapy, wow.

A few points of note:<p>1. This doctor is widely-described as a pathologist. So it seems unlikely he would have developed any cancer treatments as a lead investigator.<p>2. It&#x27;s much more likely he was part of a team that developed treatments, and that his was a supporting role.<p>3. A quick glance at Google Scholar indicates work on multiple approaches to melanoma treatment that Scolyer had some kind of role in. The article doesn&#x27;t say which one was used.<p>4. There is no &quot;cancer-free&quot; in glioblastoma. Pieces of the tumor always remain after surgery, waiting to grow back. This is part of the reason there is no cure.<p>5. MRI cannot detect remnants as in (4).<p>6. Median survival is roughly 12-15 months, so being alive at this point is not in itself much of an indication of success. Three years would be more interesting. Even three years of &quot;clean&quot; MRIs would be more interesting.<p>This story keeps getting trotted out, and the journalists doing it fail to acknowledge these points. It&#x27;s an extraordinarily complex disease that does not lend itself to feel-good stories. If it does get squashed into that box anyway, the result is misleading at best.

The extra parenthetical is very much clickbait. The doctor received surgery and care from other doctors using a protocol developed in an institute he helps helm. That&#x27;s quite different than saying he treated himself.

&gt; jogging a brisk 9.3 miles<p>I&#x27;ll just copy-edit it: &quot;jogging 15km (164 football fields)&quot;

A relative recently received immunotherapy for cancer that was spread all throughout their body, even protruding past the collarbone and visible under the skin. A little more than one year later, they have been off chemo for six months and the cancer is completely undetectable.<p>Immunotherapy is really great science that introduces a chemical that shaves off the heavy sugar coating that hides some cancer cells from the immune system. It has fewer side effects than traditional chemo, and is probably more effective.<p>Carolyn Bertozzi won the Chemistry Nobel in 2022 for the discovery.

That&#x27;s dogfooding

Well then, let&#x27;s roll this out to billions next then

I’m just about to lose a friend from this. So wish the science was further along for everyone. Hopefully in the future for others.

Even if a cure isn&#x27;t likely this is still exciting.

Light on details. Not worth reading. TLDR it’s a “vaccine” story plus standard of care, with no mention of what exactly they are vaccinating or what they mean by that.<p>“ was the first to be given a vaccine tailored specifically to his tumor’s characteristics, which would help boost the cancer-detecting powers of the drugs”

Article drops the grenade on itself in the second sentence. Glioblastoma is not staged. There is no such thing as a &quot;stage 4 glioblastoma&quot;.<p>The writer is parroting the idiotic trend of people quoting the stage of a cancer as if that means something in a popular context.<p>We are now living in an idiocracy, although the New York Post got there a while ago.