
Graduate student takes a problem-solving approach to his brain cancer - user_235711
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/student-profile-steven-keating-0401
======
nickysielicki
Not the best place to vent this but having a conversation with my mother the
other day about cancer sent my mind racing. I don't think cancer will cured
for a very long time.

She had watched some evening news show talking about injecting polio into
cancer cells, which is some really cool research [1], but in explaining it to
me it brought my attention that she held some serious misunderstandings of
what cancer is. She said something like, "They would inject polio into the
cells so that the body would recognize the cancer as foreign, because for some
reason our bodies don't recognize cancer as foreign."

I just wonder how many people have absolutely no idea that cancer is just a
damaged cell behaving naturally. It's not foreign. And with that in mind, it's
kind of ridiculous to think we can do some kind of checksum of DNA at a
cellular level, for every cell, for everyone. Cancer is here to stay, because
it's as fundamental to life as aging and growing.

[1]:
[http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?i...](http://www.cancer.duke.edu/btc/modules/Research3/index.php?id=41)

~~~
dekhn
actually, tumors are being immunosurveilled constantly, and when the immune
system identifies those cells, it tries very hard to eliminate them. The
immune system doesn't know or care that the cells are "foreign", just that the
cells have properties, or tags that correlate with properties, that make those
cells dangerous.

While I generally agree there will be no single silver bullet technology by
which we "cure all cancer" in a general way with little to no side effects, I
think it's not inconcievable that improving our ability to identify
potentially damaging our cells will contribute a lot to keeping people cancer-
free.

And while I also generally agree that cancer is inextricably intertwined with
tissue growth, as an existence "proof", cancer has never been observed in
naked mole rats; this observation alone is significant.

~~~
nickysielicki
Wow thanks for commenting, the bit about the naked mole rats is really
interesting.

Can you explain the significance of injecting polio into cancer cells? Is it
just to make the immune system definitely see that the cell is bad?

~~~
jakejake
The theory is that cancer cells develop a protein barrier that hides their
anomaly from the immune system. The polio virus is thought to damage that and
the immune system thus starts to recognize them as mutated cells.

For the patients in the 60 minutes special who experienced remission (if you
will), they received one injection, then it took over a year for the tumors to
go away.

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acoravos
The MIT article is heartening, but Steven's speech about his experience is
even better. If you have 12 minutes to watch it -- it's worth it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L-WFukOARU)

~~~
guru_meditation
The talk was both profoundly touching, informative and surprisingly cheerfully
optimistic. He really did convince me that MIT and Harvard are some of the
best places to be at if you have cancer in terms of resources.

A highlight from that talk was the state of the art robotic surgery facility
at Brigham and Women's neurosurgery dept.

[http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neu...](http://www.brighamandwomens.org/departments_and_services/neurosurgery/default.aspx)

He got operated on by one of the best neurosurgeons specializing in glioma
(his condition):

[http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886](http://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/886)

------
jbob2000
He 3d printed his brain tumor because his doctors gave him access to his
health data. Such problem solving!

~~~
chatmasta
My girlfriend is basing her entire PhD around spatial modeling of tumors. It's
not as simple as you would expect. She's actually working in a physics lab
despite being in a bioinformatics program because the PI is focused on
material packing research. Turns out physics does impact cancer!

Understanding how cells and populations of cells grow, from a 3 dimensional
and spatial perspective, is a fundamental step in understanding our biology
because it's research rooted in math and the real world. What do cells
actually, physically look like, and how do they interact? These are questions
biologists barely have the answers to, if they have them at all, and only
recently have we unlocked the ability to try to answer them. Cancer research
is a main beneficiary of super computing because it allows us to build
simulations much closer to reality than we previously could.

Don't take the ability to 3d print a tumor for granted!

~~~
michaelochurch
Tumors are also, sadly, the less scary subcase of cancer. Single tumors can be
targeted, shrunk, and often taken out. It's the undetectable "lucky" cells
that might survive chemo and radiation that make the disease so hard to fight
(because, as with antibiotic resistance, they've now been selected for
resistance to the drugs/radiation).

------
xxcode
The problem here is that he is joining Neri's group. Neri is an architect who
tries to design articles inspired by biology. It's all wishy washy with her
(at-least from the science perspective).

So all that enthusiasm is going to Zilch, unless he wants to be a brain
skeumorphia artist.

Again, this might inspire some awesome things, but maybe not traditional
science research. I think most of HN can buy that.

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u23KDd23
One symptom, phantosmia, is the only information he needed to suspect seizures
or cancer.

------
michaelochurch
Is there any reason why we don't do full-body scans on a regular basis? Is it
too much radiation? It seems to me that (a) this is the only way to deal with
silent cancers like many pancreatic kinds that are discovered at Stage IV (at
which point, the prognosis is terrible) and (b) it would be cheaper to do the
scans than to deal with the (expensive, and often ineffective) late stage
cancers.

I'd imagine that there was a time when this was impractical because of the
amount of radiation involved, but is that still the case? Don't we have
extremely low-radiation X-ray devices that can make regular full-body scans a
reality?

~~~
kgwgk
There are multiple reasons, not only the direct harm from radiation. The
latest book from Dr. Welch "Less medicine, more health : 7 assumptions that
drive too much medical care" explains some of them. The table of contents
provides a good summary of his message:

ASSUMPTION #1: ALL RISKS CAN BE LOWERED

Disturbing truth: Risks can’t always be lowered—and trying creates risks of
its own

ASSUMPTION #2: IT’S ALWAYS BETTER TO FIX THE PROBLEM

Disturbing truth: Trying to eliminate a problem can be more dangerous than
managing one

ASSUMPTION #3: SOONER IS ALWAYS BETTER

Disturbing truth: Early diagnosis can needlessly turn people into patients

ASSUMPTION #4: IT NEVER HURTS TO GET MORE INFORMATION

Disturbing truth: Data overload can scare patients and distract your doctor
from what’s important

ASSUMPTION #5: ACTION IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN INACTION

Disturbing truth: Action is not reliably the “right” choice

ASSUMPTION #6: NEWER IS ALWAYS BETTER

Disturbing truth: New interventions are typically not well tested and oft en
wind up being judged ineffective (even harmful)

ASSUMPTION #7: IT’S ALL ABOUT AVOIDING DEATH

Disturbing truth: A fixation on preventing death diminishes life

~~~
seagreen
This seems like a repetition of the same point seven times.

Let me try to rephrase your seven assumptions into a single, strong argument:
"Doctors and patients treat intervention as the default response to medical
issues, but there are situations where intervention is (on average) neutral or
harmful."

This is true. It is not a strong argument against medical scans however[1].
For instance, the result of the scans could be analyzed by a third party who
isn't the patient or the doctor. Issues could only be passed along to the
doctor if it will lead to a statistically better outcome for the patient.

[1] It might be a strong argument given a sufficiently weak culture, for
instance one that is unable to provide legal immunity to the statistics-
running third party. If your argument is, "We suck so bad we can't do
'statistics', so putting our heads in the sand is actually the best outcome we
can get", you can just say that directly.

EDIT: Changed "can't" to "can". Thanks kgwgk.

~~~
kgwgk
> If your argument is, "We suck so bad we can't do 'statistics', so putting
> our heads in the sand is actually the best outcome we can't (?) get", you
> can just say that directly.

As far as I know, the statistics we have show that it is better to avoid doing
full-body CT scans to asymptomatic people in the first place. Maybe you have
different statistics?

