For many, chemotherapy is much too aggressive and it is difficult to recuperate from the treatment.

to see if the chemo kills you or the cancer first.

It is especially hard on the elderly. I saw it with my mother, who went downhill rapidly once chemo started. Her body couldn't fight the chemo and the cancer, plus the infections that resulted. My oldest sister went from being relatively healthy one day to being unconscious and at death's door in a couple of weeks, after a regiment of extremely aggressive chemo treatment.

I wonder if some day people will look back at chemo and radiation, much the way we look back at bloodletting and mercury.

I truly questioned after the third if I could survive any more. It is brutal. I hope this is an answer.

She did not have chemo either time.

This might be the biggest story of the day.

It seems we truly are on the verge of major advancements in the treatment of cancer. Wow!

I had the whole shebang - chemo, mastectomy, radiation, and then hyperbaric oxygen treatment to heal the wound left by radiation, and I would never have the courage to add up all the bills incurred (lucky me, to have been 65 when the disease was discovered).

a new drug is being designed and manufactured for each patient.

T cells are harvested from the patient and grown for weeks in a culture. Meanwhile, the genetic information is sequenced from her tumors.

Then the harvested cells are modified so they can identify and attack the tumors. This anti-tumor response can’t be exported for use on the general population.

It’s bespoke cancer treatment and, unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a way to use economy of scale to help bring the price down. Just one more reason that medical treatment shouldn’t be driven by profit margins.

Thanks for the thread demmiblue

a friend of mine could have had the same treatment. She didn't make it.

Immunotherapy using either checkpoint blockade or the adoptive transfer of antitumor lymphocytes has shown effectiveness in treating cancers with high levels of somatic mutations—such as melanoma, smoking-induced lung cancers and bladder cancer—with little effect in other common epithelial cancers that have lower mutation rates, such as those arising in the gastrointestinal tract, breast and ovary1–7. Adoptive transfer of autologous lymphocytes that specifically target proteins encoded by somatically mutated genes has mediated substantial objective clinical regressions in patients with metastatic bile duct, colon and cervical cancers8–11. We present a patient with chemorefractory hormone receptor (HR)-positive metastatic breast cancer who was treated with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) reactive against mutant versions of four proteins—SLC3A2, KIAA0368, CADPS2 and CTSB. Adoptive transfer of these mutant-protein-specific TILs in conjunction with interleukin (IL)-2 and checkpoint blockade mediated the complete durable regression of metastatic breast cancer, which is now ongoing for > 22 months, and it represents a new immunotherapy approach for the treatment of these patients.

and, how soon until Trump takes credit for this happening while he was president?

(Yes, I know that she's been clear of cancer for 2 years now - when Obama was president - but that hasn't stopped Trump for taking credit for pre Trump good news before)

I worry about this a lot because I've had too much to drink in my day and that's a huge factor for breast cancer.

2 years cancer free is nothing, especially for a woman so young.

first time I've seen it.

Science actually produces results

not a for profit private corporation, and Trump cut their budget.

“We’ve run out of UniProt”

A little stumble is all, but the timing was perfect. She is a good ambassador for DARPA, and science in general.

As to "the baseline sequence..." Were you thinking of the possible unintended consequences? Ones that huge amounts of literature and films prime us to anticipate possible disaster?

Yeah...crossed my mind.

I hope the medical industrial complex allows us to have it.

It has taken too many of my family.

Both my parents and all of their siblings had cancer. So, with me, it's not "if" but "when."

On the other hand, my wife has had it twice and beat it twice, as have all the women in her family, and they all lived to over 90. Her second time was only survived due to awareness by her doctors and luck.

One of our best friends was stricken by an aggressive form of breast cancer in 1988. They tried an experimental form on immunotherapy with her back then. It gave her maybe an extra six months, but she still died at age 36.

lost a dear friend to breast cancer a couple years ago. Sad.

This is wonderful!!