[rjett]

I'm not a cellular biologist or a doctor of any kind, but I consider myself a reasonably smart person. Reading the book Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christofferson and tracking the work of Thomas Seyfried and others, it makes me think that a lot of the discussion in the battle for curing cancer is chasing a false paradigm: that cancer is a disease of genetics and if we could understand and edit the genome, we could cure the disease. The case for the Metabolic theory of cancer as laid out by Seyfried is quite compelling and if true, the implications for treatment from a patient standpoint seem to me much more preferential than the current combination chemotherapies which are only getting more and more expensive and only marginally more efficacious. Work on this front is only in its infancy, but my hope is that more people become aware, more funding directed towards metabolic therapy trials, and one day it could at least be incorporated into the standard of care.

[josu]

If you read the article you'd realize that it doesn't talk about modifying the patients DNA to cure the cancer, the are just editing T cells so they will attack the cancer. Metabolic therapy seems promising, but I don't think it will ever be as effective as other forms of therapy that we will come up with.

>The treatment Wu is testing involves taking a sample of blood from each patient. A lab at a biotech company two hours away by bullet train extracts T cells from the blood. Scientists then use CRISPR to knock out a gene in the T cells known as PD-1. This engineering feat modifies the T cells so that they zero in on and attack the cancer cells, once they're infused back into each patient.

[rjett]

I realize the article is discussing a form of immunotherapy, but I think immunotherapy is also in its infancy, and given the nature of cancer cells and the heterogeneity of its own genetic makeup, immunotherapy still seems like a very blunt weapon in the war on cancer. For a patient who has already been beaten down by rounds of chemo and radiation, it offers a last ditch hope for survival, but its still laden with risks and adverse outcomes.

On the contrast, metabolic treatment is tough from the standpoint that it requires strict discipline by the patient to adhere to the protocol, but the "side effects" may actually enhance overall health at the cellular level. It's a treatment that at the very least could be melded with the current standard of care to achieve better outcomes, and yet there's very little awareness of it, possibly because there's not a lot of money in it for hospital systems.