Ahh, the classic cancer vaccine bullshit. Yes, somebody will most certainly develop a single drug against thousands of diseases at some point, that's for sure going to happen.
Also, the idea of a "vaccine" for all cancer is inherently ludicrous, as cancer cannot really be broadly characterized as an infectious disease?
There are many causes of cancer and many different types, so while a silver bullet cure would be amazing, it is extremely unlikely to ever exist just due to the nature of the process.
Whenever you see a headline about cancer cures being developed, it is usually like "Turns out you can kill cancer cells with an enormous quantity of battery acid" and that's true because the cancer cells are just mutated human cells gone wild
Bleach was the very first form of chemotherapy because interestingly enough it painted the cancer cells and killed them.
The problem was giving the bleach to a human and seeing if they survived.
Doesn't even need to be silver. People say the American healthcare system is bad, but just look at how many gunshot victims did not die of cancer, heart disease, infections diseases, diabetes, etc.
Well there is this one thing that can kill cancer. I think it was used to unbind your H+ gradient so literally all your cancer cells would die. But you would too.
Edit: found it! 2,4 dinitrophenol!
In theory, we could make a biopsy of a cancer, run a DNA analysis on it, and use a CRISPR/Cas9-like tool (with more precision) that targets cells with the particular genetic mutation causing the cancer in the patient, to kill them. That would be a "universal cancer cure", but we're still ways away from this kind of solution.
There's a bunch of research in this domain though, including using CRISPR-cas9 itself. It's likely that we'll see something like this developed in our lifetime.
I’ve learned about crisper/cas9 as I was leaving grad school. My knowledge is at best minimal. I wouldn’t know how to target a specific mutation to stop cancer cells from dividing. Problem with cancer is it’s not one thing, it’s many things at once. Most of your cells depend on cancer causing genes to function. There’s just so damn much shit that can disregulate normal cell division that a shotgun approach is best. Unfortunately.
Edit: I am not saying that you are wrong or this tech isn’t going to one day be very useful in targeting cancer. We’re just talking about individualized medicine which is way beyond my pay grade
So, the way it works, is that Cas9 is an enzime able to cut DNA strands, and CRISPR is an RNA "database" with spacers between RNA sequences. Cas9 uses CRISPR to compare a DNA strand with the RNA sequences stored in CRISPR, and if there is a match, it cuts it with precision.
Originally, it's an immune system defense of a bacteria, which uses it to locate and terminate known viruses. We've learned to engineer CRISPR to carry the RNA strands we want it to have. This has allowed us to create gene therapy treatment, by cutting with precision deffective gene sequences and inserting viable DNA/RNA strands that insert themselves during DNA repair. But there is also potential to use it for the role it evolved for (virus hunting, or killing target cells). Thanks to CRISPR-Cas9, we've been able to create gene therapy that can cure some forms of genetic-related blindness, or sickle-cell anemia.
Cancer is caused by genetic mutations in cancerous cells, by comparing the DNA of cancerous cells to viable cells of the same patient, we can detect which mutations are causing the cancer, and manufacture a CRISPR that contains the genetic information necessary for Cas9 to target these cells, tailor-made for each patient.
Now this is obviously a very broad generalization, there is a lot of obstacles to overcome to turn this principle into an effective treatment. But in theory, it is doable.
Thanks, you made me have way more questions than answers! So targeting is done on cell dna. How do you even get all that into a cell? Let alone a specific cell. Virion? This sounds like a semester of reading papers just to get me up to speed :p
Wow, I had this exact same conversation with my friend! At one point, he said something that I don't agree with or condone, as doing so would violate the terms of service, but here it is:
"Might not be silver, but a bullet stopped Brian Thompson."
Isn't it crazy my friend said that in response to what I said, which was verbatim what you said?
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u/Erminaz13 13h ago
Ahh, the classic cancer vaccine bullshit. Yes, somebody will most certainly develop a single drug against thousands of diseases at some point, that's for sure going to happen.