holycrap@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I’ve been following cures like this for years. There are three candidates in phase 2 trials right now that appear to work, they’re mostly figuring out the doses needed and there’s a big question on how long they last. Hopefully permanent but we don’t know for sure.
Diabetics have just been so beaten down by this whole thing. I was told the cure was 10 years away 40 years ago. Even if the technology described here works we could be another 15 years before we see it. Researchers said it could be here as soon as 5 years, which is true if unrealistically optimistic. I believe the cure is coming but I’m not holding my breath until I’m actually in front of a doctor about to receive the cure whatever it happens to be.
It’s like all the revolutionary battery technologies, computer storage technologies, fusion, cure for cancer, anything with graphene in it, cure for immune diseases and all that. People just love to write clickbait articles about this stuff.
Developing these ideas in the lab takes decades, and turning those ideas into actual products takes even more time. When you see articles about these topics, you can be pretty sure you’ll never hear about it again.
The real reason it takes time is because we try not to harm people even in experimental drug testing. It would be much faster to simply toss shit at the wall and see what sticks, but that's not exactly humane. So we have to find analogues that hopefully mimick humans will enough, but they don't really work well. So it takes lots of time to build up enough evidence with those preliminary tests to convince the safety board to allow human trials. Then trials have to slowly scale up to limit the amount of people harmed by unforseen effects with a lot of time between as the safety board reviews the previous results before allowing the next test.
It's all good to do, but it does make development frustratingly slow sometimes.
Looking at the price per kWh for commercial batteries tells me that we are seeing the battery revolution right now.
Graphene is already commercially used in some applications:
There are already very effective cures for some types of cancer (note that the differences between the many types of cancer can be huge and so the effort and time needed to create cures will also be very different. some treatments also are effective but not completely understood yet, like for bladder cancer)
Nuclear fusion devices are commercially used in material analysis (mostly for semiconduction industry and ore processing). There are different types in use – some even use thermonuclear fusion on a small scale.
It all seems like super crazy supercoducter level tech until it becomes mundane and part of peoples lives … then we stop noticing how amazing it really is.
Oh, I’m not saying that development isn’t happening. I’m just saying that the articles you see on the magazines and papers tends to focus on wild technologies like grinding metals into nano particles and using that as a battery. Yes, New Scientis (or was it Scientific American… can’t remember) actually wrote about that stuff and predicted that cars of the future would use this energy source. Ideas like that get reported bacause they sound cool, while incremental upgrades to plain old lithium ion technology gets ignored by the tech magazines.
I’m really looking forward to seeing graphene and carbon nano tubes being used in various applications. Scaling up your production usually is the real problem though. Even if you’re able to produce a few micrograms of something in the lab doesn’t mean you can actually turn that into a commercial product. The transition from NiMH to Li-ion seemed like that for a while until one manufacgturer (was it Sony or Philips?) took the risk and started making those batteries in massive scale. Consumers loved that, and before long everyone started using this wonderful new technology. When someone takes that risk with graphene, we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere.
Sort of, they did find a covid vaccine pretty quickly. I’m hoping this is part of that research.
mRNA vaccines had been in development for about 20 years prior to 2019. We were lucky.
How long has this been in development?
Graphene actually is used in small amounts in a few places today. The difficulty is still in scaling up production.
I won’t really know which computer storage technologies you’re referring to. There are plenty of different ones, most of them just have niche applications or are too expensive to replace today’s SSDs for general use, as SSD technology have gone a long way. It’s a similar story to batteries, honestly. Lithium is still just the cheapest for what it does, but alternatives for niche applications exist.
Fusion needs more funding, no way around that, otherwise the theory is sound.
But of course, it is true there’s tons of clickbait. But promising new developments do exist.
Before SSDs became widespread, the tech news would usually find a way to include an article about a revolutionary new storage technology that could store 100x more than a CD. Yes, that was a long time ago, and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again.
100x more than a CD?
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
Conventional (or “pre-BD-XL”) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual-layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs. Triple-layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple-layer discs (128 GB) are available for BD-XL re-writer drives. source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again. source: you :D
I was thinking of forwarding this to a friend with type 1 and remember the tale of misery from the last one I sent. Exactly what you said. She’s 38. Don’t get her hopes up.
Reversing type 1 is a complete lie. Unless you can somehow magically reatore pancreatic cells
You actually can, that’s the easy part surprisingly. The hard part is keeping the body from killing beta cells after you induce their growth which is why it’s not cured yet.
Look up Vertex. They have stem cell derived beta cells they’re looking to put in a pouch to avoid immune response, but AFAIK the production of the beta cells is a solved problem. They implanted those cells in someone and he’s seemingly cured.
www.nytimes.com/…/diabetes-cure-stem-cells.html
The issue is that cure currently comes with life long immunosuppressants.
A few people asked for more information about these trials that I referred to above. In theory if you can cure one autoimmune disease you should be able to use the same method to cure any of them. Obviously we don’t know that for certain and diseases like Diabetes has the extra step of inducing the growth of new beta cells to produce insulin (more on that below)
That said, the three trials I referred to are Celiac specific. I have this and T1D so those are the two I’ve been following most closely, but I definitely dive into news on ms or any of the other autoimmune diseases.
Note: all of these entered phase 2 this year. They are in the EARLY EARLY stages of that phase, so we should see results in 2025/26 for these. I am also ignoring any trial not in phase 2. Also note that several diabetes and ms cures are essentially variants of these, and many of them are running in parallel.
KAN-101: This is from Anokion and happens to have a trial in my area, hence it’s the one I know the most about. This one works by targetting the liver where the relevant immune cells are produced. Even in their phase 1 trial they found that patients had a dose dependent reduction in IL-1 (a cytokine that your body releases in the presence of gluten if you’re celiac). As with all these trials they need to determine what dose is needed to be a full cure and is it permanent?
TAK-101: This is an MS cure that was adapted for celiac disease, originally developed by ImmunisanT. They also have several other variants of this one, including T1D. Unfortunately their website seems to be down. Takeda is handling the clinical trials here and last I heard they’re waiting for the celiac results before pushing forward with the others, but they expect them to move quickly at that point. Here’s a video by one of the researchers behind this.
TPM502: I know the least about this one, it’s from Topas Therapeutics and they recently announced the start of phase 2 trials in Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. [more]
I should emphasize that there is no guarantee any of these treatments will work and everyone is tired of the latest “breathrough” that we never hear about again. Some of the trails above had to go back to the drawing board after hitting phase 2, TAK-101 is a newer generation of “Nexxvax” which if you google that you’ll find articles about its cancellation.
Then Diabetes has the problem of beta cells needing to be restored or replaced. That’s looking feasible either by transplanting adult cells, stimulating the growth of new ones using stem cells or a similar concept. One proposal hides the beta cells from your immune system entirely inside a scaffold. That last one is more of a new treatment than a cure, but it definitely beats what we have now.
The good news is that work IS being done in this area, progress is being made, and I know at least with KAN-101 they have demonstrated it showing results. The cure is coming. Even if most or all of these trails fails the fact that they’ve seen the results that they have is still really good news.
Again, it’s coming. It’s just not in a hurry.
Thanking you for the knowledge dump. Always appreciated.
Thank you for this. I have T1D and it seems like every other day I’m hearing about a new cure for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Good to know that this isn’t just more clickbait. Still not getting my hopes up yet but I’ll be interested to see where this goes.
If there was sufficient funding and enough people on it, we surely could have gotten so much further in so much less time.
Of course you can speed up such developments only up to a certain degree. But given the state of so many important research fields, we’ve surely not scooped out the whole potential.
What phase 2 specifically if you don’t mind sharing? They mention in this article starting with a phase 1 for celiac and then a phase 1 for MS.
I’ve also seen so many of these over a couple decades now. I have RA and MS and often times while hope can be important. As Red said, hope is a dangerous thing and can drive a man insane.
I also have really complicated relationship with hope. Mainly, I try not to hope as my body seems to be insanely problematic. I am disabled with multiple autoimmune diseases and genetic syndrome. While objectively I find the advancement in treatment interesting and amazing, I personally try not to hope. It is absolutely exhausting to get your hopes up only for the other shoe to drop.
Over the years you learn to pick and choose which ones to even read about.
My favorites are when actual new meds are introduced to patients and the majority of the article talks about how much money they expect it to make for the pharmaceutical company.
What are the 3 candidates you mentioned?
I’ll come back in a few hours when I’m on my computer and give you the list. I’m sure others will be interested in it as well.
I asked for a bit more info as well before I saw this response. Thanks.
I posted more information above in this comment: lemm.ee/comment/3624282
TAK-101 is a celiac variant of a (currently paused) MS vaccine. I linked a video on that in my other post that may interest you. The video predates the decision to focus on just one disease. Basically the first iteration of their technology wasn’t effective, but based on the theory that if it works on one autoimmune disease it should work on all of them, they’ve switched their focus to celiac because it’s easier to test the efficacy. Just measure the amount of IL-2 during a gluten exposure. Also it’s cheaper to run one trial than the 5 they had before for various diseases.
The good news is progress is being made on this. But don’t expect it any time soon until you can actually book an appointment to get the procedure.
I responded to my own comment above with more info, check it out here: lemm.ee/comment/3624282
RedditWanderer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s a clash between scientists needing to be optimistic about their findings to maintain funding and real people needing it asap. We need to fund more medical research outside of for-profit corporations and increasingly expensive academia
there1snospoon@ttrpg.network 9 months ago
Imagine if there was a global fund for disease cures that all the industrialized nations poured their money and resources into.
RedditWanderer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If you’re talking about The Global Fund, they only attack very specific diseases, mostly eradicated in industrialized nations but persist due to poverty (like malaria).
there1snospoon@ttrpg.network 9 months ago
Which is silly because eradicating them in some places while leaving them elsewhere just costs more money anyways.
Lev_Astov@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I can just imagine the opportunities for corruption in such an organization.
there1snospoon@ttrpg.network 9 months ago
I’m curious how we will ever be advance to the point of being a post-scarcity space faring civilization if we don’t take these sorts of steps because we’re too busy wondering about what might go wrong
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Imagine if the research and development of treatments and vaccines for endemic pathogens and genetic disorders were… you know… socialized
WoodenBleachers@lemmy.basedcount.com 9 months ago
I hear this argument all the time, but the majority of the major research comes from the US [1]. My inclination is that, because the US is for-profit, the cures are developed faster and the science is here. The socialized nations lack, it’s a fact, and it’s certainly not for a lack of resources
AA5B@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It seems like the COViD model worked pretty well. One of these days I’d like to better understand the process, but I believe it was something like ….
Vaccine developed by private companies but with a lot of government funding but more importantly, massive contracts at a fixed price.
kpw@kbin.social 6 months ago
Outside of for-profit corporations and outside of academia? So neither the private sector nor the public sector? Who should do medical research then?