Here's a paper from 2018 that discusses the prospect of using apoptosis for cancer treatment. They even talk about BCL-2.
For some reason people who write headlines like using this in the context of cancer cells.
First noticed it in 2010 when I was researching multiple myeloma treatments for my father.
It’s medical clickbait.
After 7 years all of our cells die and regenerate, but using biochemistry and some endogenous proteins glued together to control that period of time, i haven't heard about it before.
Not a medical expert, but cancers have a vast number of variations in the type of the cancer cell they create, but one common characteristic of all cancers is that they are derived from our own cells. So they should respond to some "commands" our own cells follow.
Inducing apoptosis for cancer prevention and treatment is old news though. Fasting, water fasting that is, causes apoptosis of cells en mass and has proven to be very effective in minimizing radiotherapy or chemotherapy sessions, and even a total treatment. Instead of doing 20 chemotherapy sessions, reducing it down to 1 or 2 and the cancer is gone.
Anyway, someone doing the same using a biochemical pathway and light up gene expression, is pretty novel.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/discoveries/fasting-as-next-ste...
Dr. Gundry has done an interview with a martial arts guy who was diagnosed with cancer, and fasted for 20 days only water, and 20 days a little meat and nothing else, and one or two sessions of chemotherapy or radiotherapy later he was clear of cancer. There are many people who talk about same experiences, from the patient side.
If some doctors are seriously researching fasting and cancer treatment, that's going to produce some measurements instead of relying on anecdotes.
I cannot find Gundry's interview, it's 5 years old something like that.
Fasting in general has been known for quite a while but (and I’m far from an expert) it only helps with certain cancers. Hell, I had a friend die this year from stomach cancer and he literally couldn’t eat or drink. He only went to the hospital when he was already skin and bones, got a few chemo treatments, and then it was too late.
This could be because the researchers need funding so they will hype the results as much as possible.
Then the articles need as much readership so the journalists hype the results as much as possible.
Then the people suffering from the disease want as much help as possible so they push the articles/papers to the doctors.
On the other hand, it's been my experience that GLP-1 agonsists weren't overhyped, I was completely surprised when my doctor prescribed Mounjaro for weight loss. Even after decades of articles about "NEW WEIGHT LOSS TREATMENT!" (See also phen-phen)
But for many cancers and other diseases not only has early detection gotten better but so has treatment and prognosis. Treatment isn't nearly as bad to go through and long term survival rates are higher. People can live longer with cancer while still being fully functioning.
Life is a precious and personal thing. Those years mean wishes fulfilled, graduations and weddings celebrated, life lived.
Some drug company or group of investors must think it's potentially profitable to develop into a real treatment.
Then they have to move up the trials ladder, from mice to humans and the steps in-between.
Then they have to get regulatory approval.
Finally, assuming the steps prior didn't fail horribly, they need to set up the manufacturing for the drug.
All the meanwhile handing off money to a bunch of people who, more likely than not, never worked for the company in the form of earnings-per-share.
So, yeah, a couple decades.
We don't have a silver bullet because these diseases are so incredibly complicated. "Cancer" is a particular type of disease behavior, but is essentially a broad class of failure states across different types of cells and tissues, with different genetic, metabolic, biochemical, and molecular dysfunctions.
We have a drug now that you can take so you won’t catch HIV, as well as another drug for HIV+ that keeps it at bay.
We haven’t found a cure-all. Rather, now we have a lot more treatment options nowadays depending on your specific cancer or illness.
If your comment was more talking about the Stone Age or something, I apologize for misinterpreting :)
E.g. from Wikipedia, female life expectancy from age 15 in Britain in the 1400-1500s century was 33 years (so reaching 48 years of age).
I don't suffer from delusions that we have accurate data on conditions like obesity and T2D going back to the middle ages, but we have seen incidence rates of these kinds of disease explode upwards over the last century.
I'd be interested in more detailed data broken down by disease over time.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-alzheimer-s-drug...
There's not a shortage of debate on whether they are effective, ought to have gotten any approval, or if beta amyloid buildup is even a cause or contributor to Alzheimer's disease, so whether we've actually made progress remains debatable for the short term until results on these drugs are in.
You’re both saying two different things.
Robust biomarker discovery in toilets would let us take care of most of the other 5%.
That's the main obvious humanitarian purpose of our project www.molecularReality.com
> TIL that scientists at Stanford University have developed a smart toilet that reads your anus like a fingerprint and monitors the health of your poop and pee. The lead researcher said, "We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique."
https://old.reddit.com/over18?dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit....
The other thing is that cancers are not created equal, not all treatments are evolving quickly. Your loved one may be suffering, and that’s your world.
I will say that I lost my beautiful wife a little over a year ago. She had an aggressive cancer, for which the 10-year survival rate was zero. Thanks to the miracle of immunotherapy, the five year survival rate is about 65%. At the same time, my 78 year old aunt successfully fought lung cancer that was a death sentence 20 years ago.
I think it’s important to share for a variety of reasons but most importantly to add some humanity to a topic that gets turned into technocrat babble.
When my brother was diagnosed with MS ~30 years later, it was a nothing burger. He gets an infusion monthly and suffers no significant impact on his quality of life.
Thank you for that comment.
that has always been the case. you go for a minor surgery, you sign a waiver. you go to a doctor, they are supposed to give reasonable care. No one can guarantee success. the same with lawyers or drivers or mechanics or technicians. basically anytime you go to someone for assistance, they can't guarantee anything. the person is themselves always responsible for everything.
[1] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/03/14/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven...
[3] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/february-2023/fake...
Most of that advancement stopped with the introduction of the FDA and its equivalents in other countries.
The story of efficacy trials falls apart when you consider the complex reality of the human body and pharmaceutical action. There are many medical procedures and drugs which we know work on certain patients some of the time, but we are prevented from giving to new patients because the high standards of Phase III efficacy haven’t been met.
If something has efficacy, then trials will eventually prove it, it’s just a matter of time. You just made a case that the process works. If efficacy can’t be shown, then it’s very risky for people to try the treatment, riskier than using something with known outcomes, and potentially riskier than doing nothing at all.
Either way this is all irrelevant to your bogus claim at the top that the FDA has anything to do with the perception that treatments aren’t improving. The top comment’s hypothesis is incorrect, which adds to the multiple reasons your proposed explanation is wrong.
It is true that regulating drugs and having an approval process causes new drugs to take time, causes some to be rejected, and that people who could use them don’t get them until approved. It is true that some people could die waiting for drugs to be approved that will be shown effective. I lost a friend this year to a cancer that had an experimental treatment that he wasn’t eligible for, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Yet this has been thoroughly debated for hundreds of years, and what we have is a system that is fairly effective at minimizing harm and maximizing effectiveness given the science we have at hand.
Your argument so far has completely ignored:
- The FDA’s Investigational Drug program.
- The Right To Try Act, and all the preceding debate and legislation.
- The fact that most new drugs developed are not effective and some have very serious consequences.
- The fact that unscrupulous actors exist, and there are widespread and serious problem with fake medicines. You have nothing to say about the data I linked to on the distribution of fake drugs currently killing children by the hundreds of thousands???
If you can’t even acknowledge the basis on which the FDA was founded (regulating drugs was made a requirement by Congress) or the fact that they are balancing competing public health benefits, then your argument will get nowhere and is not being made in good faith. If you want to demonstrate why drugs should be unregulated and why we should suffer the harm that would cause, or make the case for relaxing the regulations more than the New Investgational Drug program allows and spell out how it would lead to more benefit than harm, I’m all ears!
You might not be considering the possibility that relaxing drug testing and regulations could backfire and make it harder for effective drugs to reach the market. Maybe it’s worth researching the history of this debate a bit more?
“The Right to Try Act was ‘unnecessary in the first place’, according to Kearns. Terminally or seriously ill patients have had the ability to access investigational drugs via the FDA Expanded Access (EA) pathway for decades.”
“most people overestimate the odds researchers will determine an experimental drug is safe and effective”
“if an adverse event occurs in a patient who took the drug outside a clinical trial, it could lead to negative repercussions for eventual drug availability. […] Right to try also could divert patients away from participating in clinical trials.“
And to answer your question, your first sentence made the case. All currently approved drugs represent previously unapproved treatments. The FDA is approving 100-200 drugs per year, and processing around 2000 investigational drugs per year. No idea what you mean when you claim progress has stopped, that comment doesn’t reflect reality. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/histories-fda-regulated-produc...
if you sign up for dental extraction and you die, didn't you do that on your own risk? or is the doctor responsible in this case? that he/she didn't do their job properly and now they must pay but if the doctor says "on your own risk", that suddenly they are redeemed?
Fake and/or investigational drugs carry an additional and independent risk of unknown efficacy and unknown potential harms. That additional risk layers on top of the first kind of risk of known complications. Drugs with no proven efficacy can carry additional financial risks too.
This is all why we have drug regulations - to hopefully understand the risks, minimize chances of severe harm and/or death, give consumers informed choice and allow them to assess the risk and weigh the risks against the known benefits. Unregulated drugs carry unknown benefits, and unknown & potentially very high levels of risk that patients have no hope of knowing or evaluating rationally, and that is what the comment you replied to is referring to.
Risk isn’t binary like your first comment implied. We don’t just have risk or no risk, we have risks that are known and risks that are unknown, and we have risks with different levels of harm vs benefit, and we have risks with varying levels of likelihood. In medicine it’s important for the risks to be known, for the harm levels to be low, and for the likelihood to be low. That doesn’t always happen, but if harm is likely or high then it’s important for the benefits to be high (to outweight the risks) and its important for anyone accepting the risk to have informed consent.
I didn’t realize the USA was the only Economy of Scale
That's not true. It's improving steadily: https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/survival , and with the newer advances it's going to become even better.
Yes, it's not like an exponential Moore's law graph, but there is a steady drumbeat of incremental steps. And they keep reinforcing each other.
So usually when people talk about new cancer drugs it meant that great scientists will make billions wasting their lives barely improving the quality of life for some terminally ill cancer patients and it's just kind of sad, honestly.
You don’t get to decide how long the road is to a complete solution. Just whether it will be worth it incrementally and in the end.
You don’t propose any constructive alternative.
Life, even just extending life of millions of people a bit, survival rates just a bit, is worth a lot.
The road to the clinic is long, but there have been very big improvements.
They recently found some types of rectal cancer to be PD-1 sensitive.
There is virtually no new treatment for Alzheimer for 20 years and no progress in understanding its mechanism either.
A good example is lipid nanoparticles, which for the first 15 years or more of their existence were horrifically lethal in every hominid, making their potential for delivering transformative genetic or immune cargo into cells impossible. Finally, PEGylation was introduced into their formulation, bypassing the toxic effect they had in precipitating out nearly all of each animal's platelets upon treatment. Within just a few years, LNPs became a very effective way to deliver MRNA vaccines to BILLIONS of human patients, effectively ending the worst of the Covid pandemic.
Medical revolutions are like evolutionary punctuated equilibrium -- barriers to advancement are overcome nonuniformly and often incompletely, requiring a lot of continued effort even after a revolution begins. So it shouldn't be surprising that more battles are won than wars. We should celebrate whatever victories we can. Cancer promises to be a war to end all wars.
Edit: some of the replies below are pretty bleak “it’s just a few months that’s nothing”. The difference between a 5 year and 15 year life expectancy for a parent being diagnosed with blood cancer around 60 is huge.
60+5 => 65, maybe dying before you even retire from your job.
Seems significant.
What we call a 'health' industry is a misnomer - it is a sickness industry, like the ministry of defence is really the ministry of attack.
If you want to really get cynical, you can consider the possibility that a lot of treatments are not only unnecessary, but actively detrimental to the person receiving the "treatment". The person in future may develop diseases that will then open further revenue streams from what would otherwise be a healthy individual. This would assure a healthy pipeline of future revenue for the pharmaceutical companies.
Luckily we have government agencies to manage the pharmaceutical products we are given. Unfortunately, it is something of an open door policy as senior government staff are then given senior positions in pharmaceutical companies.
I'm sure it all works out in the end!
Of course there is. Cures make billions.
This might be a conspiracy theory stupider than flat Eartherism. It requires not only every Western pharmaceutical company’s collaboration, but also every one in every other country, and also all the public labs, and every world leader and their families to suck it up for the conspiracy’s sake.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-u4cr3fJ0
Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions. That money is a great motivator is not really a conspiracy.
> Most people act against their conscience pretty much every day for money, more so in senior positions
This isn't about conscience, it's about greed. Cures are great business. Also, again, rich people get cancer. If you want to come up with healthcare conspiracies, don't pick a disease the rich and powerful get.
Which option is selected in a capitalist society?
... I mean I think you are possibly not just paying attention. All sorts of things that were absolute death sentences within recent memory are now very treatable. News articles tend to overhype, of course, but cancer treatment now is a different world to a few decades ago.
There is a lot of overhype in the news. When they claim that a new 80% improvement in batteries we all know it's a joke a laugh. When there is a similar exaggeration in cancer cures we get sad.
The saddest part is that the overhype shadows all the small/local improvements. They are better explained in sibling comments. Medicine is not my area so they give better examples than what I can choose.
When I read a new about my area or something close enough, it's fun to try to guess what was the original new before it was badly rewrote by the press and how interesting it is. But when there are lives related to the new, it's not fun to read post with unrealistic promises.
So we never seem to get a dramatic breakthrough, but what we do get is steady improvement over the course of decades. And that's why we have electric cars now with ranges over 400 miles, while back in 1996 the EV1 had 70 to 100 miles.
I think cancer treatments are pretty much the same.
F*ck. Progress does exist - life has got enormously better but people reuse to see it and focus their entire lives on living the same day over and over and wonder why they are unhappy.
The problem is that most of the 80% advance in your batteries are small 2-3% advances that never got a huge press cover. The 80% improvement press announcement are the unrealistic ones.
PS: My favorite weird quantum anecdote that nobody know and everyone uses was Giant Magnetoresistance. Have you ever read about it? Do you have a device that uses it at your home? Is it weird to have two currents instead of one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance But now the SSD ruined the anecdote :( .
What is your basis for this claim?
Historically, cancer was treated with therapies that are toxic to all cells, relying on the fact that cancer cells divide quickly and are unable to handle stress as well as normal cells (chemotherapy, radiation).
The last couple of decades we've seen many targeted cancer therapies. These drugs generally inhibit the activity of a specific protein that lets the cancer cells grow (e.g. EGFR inhibitors) or prevents the immune system from killing the cancer cells (e.g. PDL1 inhibitors).
This mechanism is way more interesting. The gene BCL6 is usually turned on in immune cells when they are mutating to recognize foreign invaders. This process involves lots of DNA damage and stress, but BCL6 stops the cells from dying and is therefore important for normal immune function. Unfortunately, this makes BCL6 a gene that is often co-opted in cancer cells to help them survive.
The method cleverly exploits the oncogenic function of BCL6 not by inhibiting it, but by turning it into a guide, enabling the delivery of activating machinery to the targets of BCL6 and reversing the inhibitory effects on cell death.
The whole field of targeted degraders, molecular glues, and heterobifunctional molecules is a growing area of interest in cancer research.
BCL-2 inhibitors, mainly Venetoclax, is used in cancer therapies quite often which also triggers cell apoptosis and it’s very effective. It was also designed to target B-cell related cancers, but it found to be so effective that FDA approved it to be used in primary cases of Acute Myeloid Leukemia. So, killing cancer with triggerring apoptosis is very well known. I think the novel part might be the two protein, so it is probably more targeted for metabolic activities… but yeah didn’t read the paper yet.
Anyways, for the side effects a major one could be Tumor Lysis Syndrome (TLS). Basically, if you apoptose the cancer cells super fast, the molecules from those cells spread everywhere and it becomes toxic for the patient. This is at least the case for Venetoclax.
I guess some payload delivering mechanisms expect very 'standard' features from cancer cells?
In practice, we can only make use of some known mutations. Not just for delivering chemicals, but also for "teaching" the immune system to attack such cells, which, once it is able to recognize them, it will do vigorously.
Let's hope that this catalogue will grow until it covers at least all the typical cases.
With "induced proximity" approaches like the one in this study, all you need is a molecule that binds the target protein somewhere. This idea has been validated extensively in the field of "targeted protein degradation", where a target protein and an E3 ubiquitin ligase, a protein that recruits the cell's native proteolysis machinery, are recruited to each other. The target protein doesn't have to be inactivated by the therapeutic molecule because the proteolysis machinery destroys it, so requirement #3 from above is effectively removed.
The molecule in this study does something similar to targeted protein degradation, but this time using a protein that effects gene expression instead of one that recruits proteolysis machinery. The article focuses on the fact that cancers are addicted to BCL6. This is an important innovation in the study and an active area of research (another example at [1]), but leaves out the fact that these induced proximity platforms are much more generalizable than traditional small molecules because it's the proteins that they recruit that do all the work rather than the molecules themselves. This study goes a long way to validate this principle, pioneered by targeted protein degradation and PROTACs, and shows that it can be applied broadly.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.27.605429v1
If it is indeed credible … this sounds like the “CRISPR moment” of cancer treatment, sure. And I’m really happy for that.
But I will be honest and write what I’m thinking: if this is real then frankly I’m disappointed it took this long. Do we really have our best people working on cancer? I have known so many who died waiting.
It seems like there has been roughly the same investment this decade (around $200B) in climate tech compared with cancer research, and yet electric cars and batteries are now a “solved problem” that’s just waiting to scale. The progress with Cancer is noticeably less. Is the money being well spent? Or are we donating $100B-s for researchers and labs to sit on a gravy train making sub tier progress.
Here’s a wild theory. Perhaps as a society we built the wrong prerequisites to get into cancer research and we filtered out all the Mozart’s and Leonardo’s…
It took time to know what each protein does in a cell (we still dont really understand most of them), it took time to find all the ways that various cancers use the protein machinery in the cell to their benefit (new ways are still being discovered these days), it took time to think about molecular glues and turn them practical, and it took time to build the right chemistry and then test it (it takes time even after you know all of the previous steps.) It will still take years, possibly over a decade before this particular development can lead to a drug that passes human clinical trials and is eventually approved. It is not the lack of geniuses that slows things down, rather it is the very careful consideration of risks to minimize the loss of human life during experimentation, and the attempt to optimally allocate the resources across too many different challenging problems in order to maximize the long term benefit to society. The true amount of money spent in cancer research is much higher than the $200B over a decade that you mentioned, however the vast majority of it is just capital losses of various companies spent on the tools and research in early stage discovery across tens of thousands of projects, and a separate huge and more obvious chunk goes to attempts and failures at human clinical trials. The cost of drug discovery has stopped increasing exponentially during the last decade but is still pegged at several billion dollars per approved drug without counting costs from competitors who never get anything approved.
Let me ask a clarifying question: Are you saying that the first thing you would have tried is to synthesize bivalent molecules that link ligands of the transcription factor B cell lymphoma 6 (BCL6) to inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs)?
Or are you just saying that you would have tried to drive cancer cells to self-destruct (but have no clue how)?
BCL6 is lymphoma.
CDK regulate cell death, amongst other things.
So yes, I am saying that it seems very straightforward as an approach to attempt to trigger a CDK cell death when BCL6 is present.
It seems hard to believe that it is presented as novel with the amount of funding that has been spent on cancer.
That's cool. Where do you think that domain knowledge comes from? Did we just found it in a fortune cookie? Or does the cancer research conducted has something to do with that we have this knowledge?
> BCL6 is lymphoma.
That's not correct. BCL6 is a protein, or a gene which codes that protein. Mutations in BCL6 can lead to B cell lymphomas. BCL6 is not lymphoma.
> I am saying that it seems very straightforward as an approach to attempt to trigger a CDK cell death when BCL6 is present.
Excellent. Sounds like you are an oracle of oncological research roadmap. What should be the next target to develop drugs for?
3 of my immediate family have had cancer, 2 took chemo and it ruined their lives (it caused weak bones, their spines to virtually dissolve, which led to surgeries to insert plates and things, which have failed multiple times, it has been a mess).
The third was not eligible for chemo because they were too sick and they had an existing case of lupus. So we started trying things -- probably 100 different things at first. What worked for them is taking Sanguinaria canadensis daily orally. It is now 15 years later and they still have cancer but are living a normal and healthy life.
You know, despite being the most effective treatment you could possibly hope for in this situation (besides an actual cure), there are only a few papers on Sanguinaria canadensis, and most research discredits it. Other friends of mine have tried chemo and died in a horrible way. Now you understand my criticism of cancer research. For all the money that has been spent, the most viable treatment available through a hospital is still a living nightmare.
> cancer research has still failed society as a whole.
How do you distinguish cancer research failing society vs cancer being a damn hard problem and cancer researchers doing their best they can do?
For me sci-hub.pub opens a simple page listing other sci-hub URLs, but each and every one of them fails, ending in "Unable to connect" as if the server did not exist. (Tested: sci-hub.ee, sci-hub.ren, sci-hub.ru, sci-hub.se, sci-hub.st, sci-hub.wf).
Is sci-hub still working for people, I haven't been able to use it for a while.
edit: Wow, it works if I go there via VPN… incredible. So sci-hub is illegal in France?
My partner was diagnosed with stage 4 sarcoma about a month ago and life as I know it has been flipped upside down.
>> the chimeric compound killed only diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells
Then it's like, you realise that everything you had imagined over the next 40 - 50 years is suddenly not going to happen anymore, and it just feels so surreal.
Thankfully, a lot of the initial hysteria is gone. But there's definitely a sense of "why me?"
I have a chronic condition and spent years wondering "why me?". Now my thoughts are more like "why not me?" and to try and embrace what life we're lucky to get and live day by day. Godspeed
I myself became Eastern Orthodox about 15 years ago, which has a somewhat different view of death than Western European Christianity (1). There’s also an acceptance that death occurs and that we prepare for it in our hearts, while still believing that death isn’t “natural” state. It’s a dichotomy of beliefs, but helped me accept both the reality of death but a hope for more. I pray and also love the funeral prayer in Orthodox Churches of “may their memory be eternal”. Very beautiful.
I also find the Stoic philosophers (Marcus Arelius, Epictetus) to hold to an acceptance of death and similar views of preparing oneself for it as Orthodox do. They discuss the concept of “memento mori” (2) which plays a big role in Stoic Philosophy. They focus on directing one’s internal emotions to gratitude of time with loved ones and settling anything weighing on your heart, if I understand them.
At the end of the day, both focus on preparing ourselves to realize we can die any moment and really don’t have any “right” to life. That it’s better to view each day as such and to find gratitude and peace with loved ones while you can instead of focusing on ourselves and expectations of life. We can and should feel sad and disappointed but also to not become lost in it.
Apologies for the poor writing. I’m writing on my phone and well it’s a hard topic. My mother passed away last year way too young and there’s always a feeling of loss.
May you find peace friend.
1: https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spiritualit... 2: https://www.stoicsimple.com/stoicism-death-facing-fears-of-m...
But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
We're made of all the same stuff as those stars. We are the universe, and if we care, that means the universe cares as well. When we have the power to do something, that means the universe has the power to do something.
I think what's been helping has been reading about death and what that means and potentially feels like. I think part of the issue is that the topic of death is so misunderstood and feared, that it creates no reasonable way forward mentally. So hopefully I can learn more about that over the coming weeks.
I'm a vegetarian and a celiac (no gluten) so I don't eat a lot of processed food. Rice, oatmeal, corn tortillas, black beans, cheese, hemp hearts, flax seeds, chia seeds, Sriracha, coffee w/honey and hazelnut creamer - all that is easily 90%+ of my diet. I also drink a protein drink called OWYN daily.
About once a week I'll have a little to eat in the morning and then I just won't really get hungry again til really late and I'll often just not eat then and go to bed. Intermittent fasting is great. A few times a year I'll go a few days without really eating - there are so many benefits to the process. The primary being autophagy - that I sus is the reason I look so much younger than people my age.
The science of sleep radically disagrees with the next thing I'm about to say.
The process with food and the body is very similar to the process of sleep and the brain.
Occasionally pulling an all nighter playing video games (can't be a stressful all nighter) is actually good for you - it resets some stuff in your head. This can be particularly effective for dealing with certain states of depression or melancholia.
Just went to a funeral this weekend for a 40 year old who died of breast cancer 4 weeks after diagnosis at her first annual mammogram.
A lot of skeptical people under 30 here haven't lived through regularly various cancer diagnoses in their friends & family group that your late 30s/early 40s starts to bring.
I don't have the data on it, but anecdotally I notice that women's cancers seem to strike 5-10 years earlier than mens even if they can be caught early & treated well.. Though apparently men have overall worse cancer survival rates.
Even for cancers that shouldn't be sex-specific, like lung cancer, men are less likely to survive it.
The physical rotation/tumbling of molecules in an MRI is also very important, because the strong magnetic field is the thing inducing the "up"-vs-"down" split in the first place, and if the molecular motion is happening at a certain frequency with respect to the external magnetic field there are other interactions that can come into play which can affect the coherence of the nuclear spins (i.e. they can fall out of sync). Thankfully, the rotation of a small molecule like pyruvate is very fast (might higher then the "spin" frequency-a.k.a the Larmor frequenct of 13C at the magnetic field strengths involved in MRI) so the physical tumbling of pyruvate doesn't really come into play when trying to measure its signal. It can be another story for molecules that don't tumble quickly, like the ones that make up tissues, fat, etc.
Worth reminding the women in your lives to check their family history and consider getting early exams either way. A lot of times it turns out women do have family history that went undiscussed until they ask mom, aunts, grandmothers, etc.
The other cancers that worry me are the slow moving imperceptible symptomless ones like pancreatic, liver, kidney, etc. Know a few people who around 50 discovered they had stage 2-3 cases due to unrelated scans they got from an accident injury. Some of these you have 5-10+ years window to treat it and live without impact to lifespan.. but most people don't catch it until stage 4 when they actually feel sick and it is too late.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/health/cancer-self-destru...
Sequence patient's tumor mutanome distribution, create personalized therapy encoding the top N neoantigens
+
Anti-PDL1 checkpoint inhibitor
+
mRNA encoded albumin-IL2
All those things have they place in the long run to discovery, but I wish there was a penalty for posting "scientists have done x and it cured cancer" (in a computer model of a spherical mouse of negative mass, that may or may not have been cancer-free.)