Hacker News

Cancer is not one thing, it's a huge zoo of many many many ways that cells start to break the social contract and divide in an uncontrolled manner.

One of the most commonly observed broken mechanisms is mutation in the gene KRAS that turns this on/off growth switch into the permanently on position.

This has been known for decades, of course. And there have been huge amounts of effort to try to develop drugs that target KRAS in cancer, but for decades it's always been thought of as 'undruggable' because of the difficulty of finding any molecules that would affect it.

This new drug, that finally treats KRAS mutated cancers, goes about it in a new way. Instead of trying to gum up the works of a single protein by sticking a small chemical in it, it effectively "glues" the KRAS protein to another protein, CypA, which keeps the switch away from reaching the normal areas where it's "on switch" activity works.

So this new drug means two things: 1) a lot of the most difficult to treat cancers are now far more treatable, and in the next 1-5 years clinical trials will tell us which cancers this particular drug works well for, 2) there's an entire new class of drug activity that everybody is chasing at this very moment, so in 5-25 years we'll likely have a huge number more of these sorts of treatments.

It won't help... mind you this is an article from the economist. There is no such thing as a cancer "master switch", that would equal a disease master switch and that point we have solved biology.

One of the many therapies that are being developed so that you can survive longer even with the most lethal tumours.

1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.

2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.

3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.

4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.

5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.

6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.

Other cancers, obesity, name it.

Does anyone have a link to the conference session?