Here is the original article with similar title: https://news.yahoo.com/first-human-patient-injected-revoluti...

It obscured the link to the actual clinical trial.

Also front page of Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/first_hum...

AMA with creator of vaccinia oncolytic viruses here: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/comment/i...

Thank you for the work you do.

Seconded, and to sizzle for the interesting links. I find this kind of thing fascinating, and there is so much to it!

What do you mean by "cold" tumors and "hot" tumors? Is cold or hot better for the survival of the person? Thank you.

Cancer cells have the ability to take advantage of the body's mechanism to prevent the immune system from attacking healthy cells, essentially signalling immune T cells to turn off using what's called immune checkpoint proteins. Essentially a cold tumor is one that has successfully shut off the immune response in this way, whereas a hot tumor is one that hasn't. This can be because of the innate behaviour of the tumor, or due to an intervention to turn it hot—like the one described by the OP, or more traditionally, using immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Is this the same mechanism that the eye and testes use to prevent being attacked by the immune system? I recall the eye has its own "immune system"(tears) since the usual one is deactivated in that region.

Would it be possible to engineer a disease(virus, bacteria) that can't be defeated by the immune system because it has this signal?

PD-1 is just one of many cell immunity expressions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_superfamily

A quick search, if I'm reading this correctly, says that HIV expresses PD-1: https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...

Let's agree as a species not to try and find out.

If the answer is "Yes, there's a protein on the cell membrane or a hormone that acts as the signal", then we already know the answer.

Can you explain where the uncertainty is coming from?

Read your question again and then realize you just wondered if it would be possible to engineer a virus to kill all of humanity, with no possible immunity.

See the problem?

This is why people hate (software) engineers, they are oh-so-dumb on the "empathizing with humanity" front... pie-in-the-sky ambitions that are more likely to be shitty solutions replacing ones which worked well enough, to blow up, potentially catastrophically, or cause various humanity-ending apocalypses, than to actually solve the problem in most cases...and what do they have to say for themselves?

"Oh I didn't think about that".

-_-

The notion is quaint that there exists Knowledge Man Is Not Meant To Know. If it's something humans can find out, it's better that it be right out there in the open so that the danger can be met head on.

I recall reading a news article of a woman Stacy Erholtz who had stage 4 cancer nothing for her worked. She was given a phenomenally massive amount measles vaccine supposedly enough to vaccinate ten million people. Note it was not an engineered version of the virus just the unaltered virus. She recovered and is cancer free which I suppose is why the story was released because it was so amazing.

Found an article about it: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03226-z

>Title is misleading - this is a first in human, safety/dose-escalation study for this particular oncolytic virus.

Thanks for this... it's to the point I rarely read articles about medical studies, because I lack the domain knowledge to evaluate them, and if I just look at the study methodology people get angry when I often notice said methods aren't super stringent.

(You can get away with that in psychology, but it's really jarring when I see the same patterns in the physical sciences.)

Here is the original non-expert article with similar title: https://news.yahoo.com/first-human-patient-injected-revoluti...

It obscured the link to the actual clinical trial.

Also front page of Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/first_hum...

AMA with creator of vaccinia oncolytic viruses here: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/comment/i...

Oh I can't post on Reddit anymore. People purposefully started sitewide banning me whenever I'd get a decent social media following.

(Have you used Mastadon? I'm considering checking that out)

It was a running joke that I don't look at logs for too long, stemming back to when I did a now deleted blog that listed a way to spoof your location on Facebook and I posted it with zero warning. It was literally just editing Firefo about:config and manually writing out the coordinates, not really even an input sanitization error IMHO.

I got the impression it made some people lose face that I had no security clearance, I was just some random hourly worker who threw my boss' name around too much as I attended a lot of stuff listed as open to the public where people who had TS or TS:SCI questions would show up and ask troll-ish questions.

(That leaks a LOT of information. Don't do that, if you're reading.)

I'll take a look though, thanks for the links, sincerely.

You shouldn't be able to get away with it in psychology

> You shouldn't be able to get away with it in psychology

Then next time you find a study you don't like, contact the IRB[1] that authorized it and contact your representative in Congress[2].

They publish the grant information. Say you'd prefer to receive that money instead, or that it be directed to a more ethical and useful primary investigator.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board#Uni... [2]https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

This is helpful, thanks!

No problem, but when you speak to your elected representative, please also say that they should have local police adopt a policy that all police officers carry business officers with detailed contact information.

At the meta level if someone "gives me a card" and it's just... the phone number to whoever gatekeeps access to them and an email some assistant monitors, then don't expect the same level of trust, deference, or respect as someone like me who hands out the email tied to their real name, the phone number for the SIM in their phone, and the Signal number tied to the phone number they've held onto since they were 16.

(You might notice some of my more recent posts seemed rushed, or erratic. That is because I was posting like a literal dissident: drafting things, posting, then immiedately changing locations.

A lot of the rhetoric around "community standards" of speech is more about things like, well, yeah, someone might stand up a server with Mein Kampf or something on it, and that's ok because sometimes people want to read that for academic reasons.

Anyways sorry for the wall of text, but when folks spoke to me informally, when I was debating certain roles or... companies... a lot of them spoke of things like "analysis paralysis"[1][2]

I see a lot of people nowadays who seem to take the view that if they prominently display a contact phone number and unique identifier, they can move to more of a model where anti-social behavior is the default, and challenge others to report out to some... entity... to come and deal with the issue.

(Versus making a good faith effort to follow the guidlines, and being willing to accept sincere feedback.)

Anyways sorry to wall of text you, but it's been really interesting seeing how people react to me versus others on the internet, especially when I take a long pause from posting here on the orange website ;-)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150921200100/https://theinterc... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150723204817mp_/https://www.do...

I was going to say - T-Vec was being commercialized almost 10 years ago. Using oncolytic viruses isn't new at all. The basic R&D goes back to the 1990's.

Thanks for posting this —- I posted the same objective criticism of the title and was almost instantly downvoted to -1. I expect this was in part because I also implicitly criticized HN voters for voting the original submission, which was pretty information-free, to the front page.

The theranostic aspect to me is the most interesting part.

Here is the original non-expert article with similar title: https://news.yahoo.com/first-human-patient-injected-revoluti...

It obscured the link to the actual clinical trial.

Also front page of Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/first_hum...

AMA with creator of vaccinia oncolytic viruses here: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/uvplpj/comment/i...

Always nice to see other folks on HN in this space. I'd love to connect; my email is in my profile.

Can you say it in plain English? Not all of us understand the jargon and the medical, technical and scientific aspects.

They infect the cancer cells with a virus. The virus causes the cells to create a protein that has already shown to be a good target (PD-L1). Seeing the high levels of protein, the patients immune system should trigger cell death (apoptosis).

You might have more luck if you ask for an explanation about a specific thing he said, not the whole of what he said. He said a lot of things.

Scatter-skimming your post drew my eyes to an alarming collection of phrases:

  misleading human safety dose escalation oncolytic virus in humans T-VEC inoperable engineering the virus to infect immune-mediated killing allows for targeted tumor activity cell death graphical poor prognosis anti-PD-1 pembrolizumab cancer.

Like I stumbled across a Resident Evil script. Happily the post is coherent when perused.