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JackD4wkins t1_jec6avt wrote

Reply to comment by Toranagas1 in Scientists discover how cancer cells evade immune system by BousWakebo

Reducing the number of cancer cells that survive the first round depends on how we encode the CRISPR enzyme. As long as we can identify a majority of oncogenic mutations - ideally 50+ - then the only limiting factor becomes dose size. With subsequent doses to catch the remaining cancer cells.

And yes theoretically a cancer could evolve to prevent lentivirus mediated transduction... luckily nature provides an near infinite number of viral vectors from which to choose, and we are already using directed evolution to breed specialized cancer-hunting viruses in massive quantities.

Edit: I appreciate you taking the time to point out limitations in the CINDELA method. It helps further improve.

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Toranagas1 t1_jeca51a wrote

Possibly those things could help, I guess it remains to be experimentally determined. Anyway it's a decent proof of concept paper, although the in vivo data is a little weak.

Btw, they are giving a lot of doses already, every day at lower viral titers, and every 3rd day at high titers up to two weeks. Then they cut the experiments two weeks after that so we don't really get a good sense of how things would fare longitudinally but I can tell you from having read a lot of these papers that all of those mice will die pretty close to the controls, probably delayed by only a few days or a week.

I dont mean to be negative, as I can sense you are excited by the possibilities this strategy brings up, just trying to inject some realistic perspective into the data they show.

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