
Cancer breakthrough leads China’s biotech boom - jseliger
https://www.ft.com/content/30b5a944-3b57-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a81e
======
rdiddly
Sighhh... apparently they can't just report on a story from China without
peppering it with statements about the US -- specifically about how this is a
new _salvo_ in some kind of _healthcare war_ with the US. Sometimes stuff just
happens when people do things. They're probably not pushing to advance
healthcare _just to fuck with the US._

Some made-up headlines from world history written from this incredibly
narcissistic viewpoint:

Pharaoh to Build Great Pyramid, Challenging Structure-Building Dominance of
Future Country "America"

Scientist Marie Curie Discovers "Radioactivity" in Effort to Humiliate USA

In Rare Reversal, Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" Better Than Similar American Art
Works

~~~
ixtli
Not to say that they're by any means perfect, but I think what you've pointed
out might help explain why many Americans i grew up around see the Chinese
government as some sinister and inscrutable entity that is out to silently
crush everyone. Also, you don't need to make up fake examples when you can
look up anything in the past year about how they're making big strides towards
reversing their smog problems and how that's somehow an attack on American
industry. Even trump has made these claims (
[https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uDFmIDPzCo4znxgzKlT0_jgv4C...](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uDFmIDPzCo4znxgzKlT0_jgv4CqHkarUrQ005ED_HbclD4Ex32hmOHsAn95kbFc_WZMiOQ1BMlRj4Fu-
vDLyOgnT3syuxfWFY8KxoEWpqd9gxcPzZnQUM8q76jkJzs7IQUNr_cUt) )

~~~
specialist
Younger me was a news junkie. Iran hostage crisis, USSR was gonna nuke us,
Japan was going to buy us, etc. Of course, I believed it all. Over time, I
noticed shit just didn’t add up. And no one did a mea culpa.

So I just stopped listening.

I figure all ad supported news media is ghouls profiting from human misery,
stoking fear and anxiety to keep people numb, allowing the real outrages to
happen unnoticed. (eg Project Censored)

I hope China continues to do well. Ditto everyone. We all do better when we
all do better.

~~~
RealityVoid
That sounds a little bit like survivor bias to me. Nothing bad happened to the
US, but in other countries shit went down in the last century, stuff that if
you were not informed and aware about, might lead you to... for example go to
school in the morning and realise you can't go back home since you're on the
other side of a new border.

~~~
specialist
Been chewing on your reply.

Plenty bad happened in North America. Project Censored is a good starting
place, if you want to raise your blood pressure.

I still seek news. Mostly from HN, Democracy Now, Vox, misc. It’s just that
now I consciously block any source that I feel is more noise than signal.

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farresito
[https://outline.com/tdDNdd](https://outline.com/tdDNdd)

~~~
stevemk14ebr
This should be the article linked. Mods can you switch, the current one behind
a subscription wall?

~~~
dang
It's ok to post workarounds in the threads, but we don't change the official
URLs to those. Doing that would obscure the article source, among other
reasons.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

~~~
egeozcan
Hi dang. I really do not understand why it is ok to post pay-walled articles.
It makes the frontpage a minefield IMHO. Maybe a short reason can also be
stated in the FAQ in addition to that being ok. BTW, is it also ok to post
articles behind a registration-wall? I mean, like something shared on FB which
can only be viewed by members?

~~~
dang
It's explained in the second link there as well as tons of comments I've
posted about this
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywalls&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywalls&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)).

We find the paywalls as annoying as anyone, but as long as there are publicly
available workarounds, the articles remain accessible at the price of
annoyance. This sucks, of course, but an HN without articles from any such
publications would suck worse. Since the core idea of HN is to try to optimize
for curiosity, we don't have much of a choice. Hopefully someday the
publication problem will get a definitive solution and we won't have to deal
with this crap anymore. In the meantime, publicly accessible workarounds are
the best of a bad bunch.

(Re registration sites, it's the same principle: if there's a publicly
available workaround, it's ok, if not it's not.)

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joshgel
Physician here: CAR-T is a potentially amazing technology, but really only
works in a small sub-set of the patients for which it is tried. For now

~~~
mombul
Normal person here: why?

~~~
aaavl2821
This far it only works in blood cancers, specifically B cell lymphomas. The
approved CAR-Ts target a molecule called CD19 expressed on B cells

It has not worked widely in solid tumors for a variety of reasons, including
immune suppression within the tumor microenvironemnt and difficulty finding
antigens that are widely expressed on tumors but not also expressed on healthy
cells (so you don't kill healthy tissue in addition to the tumor)

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blackrock
> A few days before Craig Chase was discharged from the Jiangsu Provincial
> People’s Hospital in Nanjing, his doctor told him something he never
> expected to hear: his cancer had been cured.

> “His English was not so good, so he used Google Translate. When he said I
> was cured, I told him it was impossible — there is no cure for multiple
> myeloma,” he recalls. “But he said, ‘no, you’re definitely cured’. It was
> unbelievable.”

> Unbelievable, perhaps, but also true. When Mr Chase, now 57, returned home
> to America after his six weeks of treatment in China to undergo further
> tests, his doctors could find no trace of multiple myeloma. The blood cancer
> he had suffered for three years — which had threatened to end his life — was
> gone.

This is incredible!

If they can figure out how to cure cancer, then how will the pharmaceutical
companies make money?

This sounds like a diabolical plan for.. Lex Luthor!

Lex: "Destroy the cure. Instead, make a drug treatment plan, that the patient
must take every week, for the rest of their life."

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guardiangod
Unlike other medical trials involving chronic illness, cancer trials have a
pretty clear indicator of whether the treatment is successful- (most) the
patients survive longer than their prognosis.

In this sense, there's not much freedom for the Chinese biofirms to commit
fraud during a treatment trial. Everything is verifiable.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Why would falsifying that data be any harder? Don’t you just substitute
patient lived for patient had less headaches or whatever?

~~~
guardiangod
You can always fudge your trial result. What I am saying is that the line
between an effective treatment and an ineffective treatment is very clear-
more patients are alive by the end of the trial. Versus, say, a test for a new
antidepressant drugs, where being 'happier' is hard to quantify.

Everything else is just record tracking.

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bastijn
This might happen more often in the near future. Whilst medical innovations
are booming due to the introduction of cheap options to run machine learning
the regulatory units are not keeping up. Getting FDA approvals is a long
process but required before they let you enter the US market. EU is easier but
soon they will put in place a new regulatory unit that is said to be even more
restrictive than the FDA. When that happens it may very well be the Asian
countries, China being a good option, India another, that take the lead when
it comes to innovation in the medical world.

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smaili
> Car-T is at the cutting edge of biology: it involves extracting a patient’s
> blood cells, re-engineering them in a lab so they can identify and destroy
> cancer and then re-inserting them into the body.

It would be interesting to see if we could one day make this more optimal by
reducing the extra step. Changing the above to:

> Car-T is at the cutting edge of biology: it involves re-engineering a
> patient's blood cells in a lab so they can identify and destroy cancer in
> the body.

~~~
yborg
That would be cool, but also creepy if my blood cells can destroy cancer in my
body while they're still in a lab. What if they start destroying cells in
_other_ people's bodies?

~~~
ShabbosGoy
That’s not how antigens work.

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melling
According to the article, Chinese firms are making advances in chimeric
antigen receptor cell therapy (Car-T) to treat cancer.

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polskibus
I wonder if a similar technique to car-t could be deployed to fight off
autoimmune diseases?

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txsh
This would be great if it were true. Unfortunately, it’s a clinical trial from
China.

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starlord97
Can anyone explain how you go about re-engineering a cell to fight off cancer?

~~~
zamalek
ELI5: Your immune system fights cancerous cells frequently. There's only a
problem when the cancerous cells evolve to avoid this by "hiding" (typically
by no longer releasing a "kill me" marker). The therapy basically gives your
immune system the tools to identify cancerous cells.

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wemdyjreichert
Paywall.

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Numberwang
I would love to be able to read this.

~~~
evgen
The people who spent the time and effort to do the research and write the
story would like to get paid. Seems like there is a simple solution here...

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desireco42
Paywall! Can't be that all of you are subscribed to FT?!

Read here, maybe update original link:
[https://outline.com/tdDNdd](https://outline.com/tdDNdd)

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thisisit
> But the most eye-catching research at last year’s conference was presented
> by a Chinese biotech group that virtually no one had heard of: Nanjing
> Legend.

I don't mean to belittle this achievement but when will media learn that there
are no "unheard" companies in China. Only those which have government backing
and those which don't.

While this an amazing story, I think it will be best to wait before
pronouncing that there is a boom or not.

~~~
riceonmars
Your second and third paragraphs have no relation to each other.

The second paragraph comes from some tabloid about China.

The third one just says “wait and see”

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bitrazor123
What will happen to american drug cartel now? FOr that matter china would be
having its own drug and animal-organ-drug cartel.

