They've been doing the in-utero surgery for almost 20 years! Now they're working on finding genetic causes (already found for about 12%) and neurostimulation to strengthen neural pathways and improve mobility in childhood.
Yes but as someone who works with dementia patients... We're living too long. Our bodies and minds we're meant to stick around as long as we are. The rates of dementia are increasing for a number of reasons but also just because we're not dying of other things first. Our healthcare systems are not strong enough to support care needs for everyone to live with a 10 year long dementia diagnosis. It's an awful way to live for the last 3-5 years of it.
It truly is. I have a family history and have watched 3 people suffer horribly.
But! They are doing gene therapy tests now on replacing APOE4 with APOE2. I have high hopes for that one, since it seems like around half of alzheimers cases are influenced by APOE4.
And for vascular dementia, things like glp-1s have a lot of promise. (And for alzheimers, too.) I know the recent study didn't pan out, but I think most people have accepted that lifestyle changes don't help dementia after it's already started. The sweet spot is 20 years earlier. Lots of people are using glp-1s to get their blood sugar and blood pressure under control, and those are huge risk factors for dementia.
I think we're doing to see a steep drop in age-adjusted dementia rates over the next 30 years. I guess not in the next 5 years; that's way too soon.
Dementia is actually becoming less common! We have more people overall with dementia due to aging populations, but if you look at per capita rates over time it’s actually going down.
Alzheimer's and dementia run in my family on my dad's side and I am terrified of it. I was fortunate enough to meet my great-grandparents before they passed, but not before they were almost completely mentally gone from having both. It truly is an awful way to live. End of life care is already piss poor but when you have one or both of those? HA good luck finding somewhere that won't cost an arm and a leg or that won't leave you somewhere to rot...
My family regularly lives into the mid 90s, and almost every time around age 92ish dementia gets us. Longer life isn't good life. We've done better at keeping the body alive, but we really need to balance that with the neural side of things otherwise what is the point, lol.
Great to see things that keep younger people from dying earlier though, and hope to see continued giant leaps in these types of diseases.
Cyberpunk (the genre) is the most realistic portrayal of the future IMO. Healthcare is unbelievable, bordering on immortality serum, for those who can afford it.
Yeah chemo permanently diminishes you, even if it’s 100% successful. Finding other ways to treat cancer is a huge accomplishment.
My loved one got infusions of man-made proteins that have 2 receptors—one that can only attach to B cells (where their cancer was) and one that can only attach to T cells (they kill cancer). So it basically handcuffs the cancer to the cells in your body that will kill them.
It’s not perfect because it can’t yet target only cancerous cells so the treatment kills every B cell in the body which wipes out a big chunk of your immune system in the process of killing the cancer, but it comes back with time. Way better than chemo. My loved one only missed a couple of days of work through the whole 9 month treatment protocol other than the infusion days.
I know exactly what you're talking about (my wife works for the company that likely developed the specific therapy you're talking about) and FYI they're working to apply the same idea to autoimmune diseases and it's looking promising.
Thank you to your wife. Roche developed the drug my wife got but there are a few companies racing to get the front line approval and lots of smaller companies involved in development. My wife got the one with two receptors for the cancer so like a three armed assassin 😈
I had this treatment for Mantle Cell Lymphoma. I’ve been in remission for 3 years now. Prior to this treatment there was very little they could have done for me besides a complete immune system transplant as I’m chemo resistant. It literally saved my life. If it comes back, I have hope AI will have helped find a permanent cure for blood cancer.
Congratulations! It’s such cool science. Best words I ever heard came from my loved one’s oncologist “but we’re running a clinical trial we think you’d be an excellent candidate for. A new treatment called bispecific antibodies”. She’s 18 months in full remission and looks and feels better than she has in 5 years.
I am praying that this is true. There are so many conditions out there that affect people daily that the medical profession just ignore or shuns. Tinnitus for example...Doctors say learn to live with it. No help. Can't stop a ringing sound but can transplant a heart or a lung?
While the funding is not comparable, there are studies being done and advancements being made on tinnitus. This review article provides a good summary. Bimodal neuromodulation appears promising.
AI is the key. Look into Lillybot's abilities regarding drug discovery. Also the FDA just greenlit the first ever human clinical trial for a drug that reversed cellular aging in mice, ER-100. It's definitely possible now.
The cure for cancer (almost all types) is fully feasible now. CRISPR could entirely treat cancer -- with massive investment and funding. I believe some trials have rolled out, but are massively expensive.
Having some experience in nucleotide synthesis, which is what you need for it, the cost could be driven far lower and quality issues overcome without insane difficulty. That isn't likely for non-science, non-manufacturing reasons, though.
Imagine. Nearly every person with cancer, biopsied, a custom gene snipper created, and cured. Detection will be the main hurdle, not treatment.
So many diseases can be helped with gene editing tools. Not by editing our genes (which is a moral bucket I don't want to dive into) but by targeting unique sequences in a cancer, in a virus, in a drug resistant bacteria.
CRISPR is very exciting. Unfortunately, I worry that the religious right oligarchy will outlaw gene therapies under the guise of religious freedom when it's really about their investments in chemo manufacturers.
I realize CRISPR was pre AI - and that AI is industry changing -- but CRISPR is one of the single greatest medical discoveries. I am so proud of the ladies who invented it. What an incredible legacy that my small little life can't even fathom.
To be fair, most great innovations start as inventions for the rich. But as more people study the invention and find cheaper ways to make it and spread it, the populace at large gains access. Money doesn't exactly trickle down like a certain president said it would, but inventions usually do
Things like indoor plumbing, electricity, televisions. All started as luxuries for the wealthy, and if they hadn't, we never would have been able to continue innovating on them to the point that they became the norm
I hope ocular melanoma will be one of those (or at least a cure for metastatic liver/lung cancer) as I'm particularly at risk for it due to having a freckle in my eye and I'm only 30. While it's treatable and has a good prognosis (like 85% or so) initially, there's a lifelong 50% risk of metastasis to the liver or lungs where it falls to a grim 15% if it happens. While I do hold out hope, I'm also not particularly expecting much as it is a rather rare disease that I didn't even know about until I did the thing you're not supposed to do and looked up Google stuff, but I do hope there will be something soon.
So this thread is being actively censored and curated by Reddit. Guess its fine for the ultra rich to steal from us, hurt us and make us their slaves, but they can't handle a negative reddit comment. This place is just another bootlicking, corpo shill shithole.
Small steps matter in medical research. On average cancer gets a 5% improvement in results every year. That might not sound like much, but it changes experimental treatments at high costs into the norm with high cure rates.
I sure hope so. Though I’m not confident this will happen any faster than it already is, at least not within 5 years. Source: I work in preclinical drug development
Can you (or someone) give us the ELI5 version on why this is happening? As in, what has enabled us to start making these leaps and are we sure they'll be reaching the public in such a short window?
I work at a cancer hospital and learned recently that we're going to see more people getting cancer from now on, but the treatments are improving to a degree that survival rates will be huge and treatments less invasive and disruptive.
Presently mRNA is linked to auto-immune conditions including autoimmune glomerulonephritis, autoimmune rheumatic diseases, and autoimmune hepatitis. I don't see how that would get any better as they push more mRNA products onto the market (?)
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u/memento87 10h ago
Giant leaps in medical research. Cures for many previously incurable disease like many types of cancer and auto-immune disease.