- "TAR-200 is a miniature, pretzel-shaped drug-device duo containing a chemotherapy drug, gemcitabine, which is inserted into the bladder through a catheter. Once inside the bladder, the TAR-200 slowly and consistently releases the gemcitabine into the organ for three weeks per treatment cycle."
- Phase 2 Clinical Trial
- 85 patients with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer
- "treated patients with TAR-200 every three weeks for six months, and then four times a year for the next two years"
- 70/85 patients—the cancer disappeared and still gone 1yr later in almost 50% patients
- FDA granted TAR-200 a New Drug Application Priority Review
- Johnson & Johnson manufactures TAR-200
woeirua · 2h ago
Unfortunately the recurrence rate after 1 year here is still quite high. Good progress, but not a cure yet.
tptacek · 2h ago
Only a small percentage had a recurrence that progressed to later-stage muscle-invasive illness, though.
lordofgibbons · 1h ago
Do cancers have a tendency to come back with better drug resistance if it's not fully eliminated? at least a resistance to the drug that got rid of it the previous time?
tomsto · 1h ago
Emphatically so, yes
codr7 · 35m ago
Return customers generate more profit.
AnimalMuppet · 15m ago
Not if the same thing can't be used to treat them again.
blackhaz · 2h ago
My father currently suffers from bladder cancer, he's currently in palliative care, he's in Ukraine. If there are any medical professionals here, could someone provide an advice - is there any chance to get him access to TAR-200?
gautamcgoel · 11m ago
So sorry to hear this, I wish him the best.
TheAmazingRace · 2h ago
I really wish this was available earlier, because I just lost a family member to bladder cancer yesterday morning. :(
bdcravens · 3m ago
So sorry to hear. My father passed from bladder cancer that metastasized 20 years ago.
xxr · 36m ago
Very sorry for your loss. An uncle had bladder cancer about 15 years ago, and while he survived, it began a very steep decline that led to his passing in 2022.
javiramos · 2h ago
Sorry for your loss.
ecoffey · 2h ago
That is tough, I’m sorry for your loss.
TheAmazingRace · 2h ago
Thank you for the condolences.
pugworthy · 2h ago
To be clear, here is the rest of what the article title should be...
> ...for individuals with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose cancer had previously resisted treatment
tptacek · 1h ago
Only those patients were admitted to the trial, so the effectiveness of the treatment on later-stage muscle-invasive disease is unknown. That it's scoped to patients who are BCG-unresponsive ("previously resisted treatment") makes the breakthrough more significant, not less.
A_D_E_P_T · 2h ago
There's an open access paper on the development of the drug here:
Sorta OT: I’m seriously freaking out AND depressed—reading about this seemingly incredible bladder-cancer treatment (and other breakthroughs I constantly see), and then seeing, in just the past 6+ months, funding slashed and the best students from around the world actively discouraged from coming to our top schools. It’s beyond alarming.
The US is literally crushing both innovation and talent at the same time. Think of all the brilliant minds who can’t—or won’t bother—coming here to test their ideas because visas are paused, revoked, or delayed for political reasons. Worse, proposed H-1B changes favoring only high-wage workers could shut out fresh grads entirely. At this rate, funding is being starved for political concessions, and the next generation of genius scientists might be too scared—or flat-out blocked—from studying and innovating here.
And it’s not just foreign students—even native US students are looking at science careers that might not exist in a few years. My wife is an accountant for research grants, and ALL her PIs are still in a daze, trying to process what’s happening.
Again… depressing AF. THe US based science/research pipeline is toast.
tptacek · 1h ago
This is a thread about what appears to be a very significant breakthrough in a major human cancer, and a majority of the comments on it are litigating a political point --- one I agree with you about, for what it's worth --- that doesn't pertain directly to the story and has been hashed out about 7 dozen times on the site this year already.
When you write comments like this, you are literally begging people to take the other side of your argument, which will inevitably have less to do with the technical details of why TB treatments are first-line therapies for bladder cancer and more to do with the First Amendment and visa protections. It's a way of having exactly the same tedious argument on every story, no matter what the story is about.
searine · 2h ago
And for some reason a contingent of HN is cheering it on.
We are breaking the innovation machine and pretending discoveries will just keep happening.
radu_floricica · 30m ago
I'm probably part of the contingent you're alluding to. I'm not cheering. I am however a lot less likely to be depressed, mostly because whenever I tried to fact check a doom-like piece of news, I found it failing, hard. So now I'm at a "once every three months" rotation - which will of course change the first time I manage to confirm a piece of news.
I am moderately pessimistic about the state of research because I do hear things I don't like, but this is compensated by my belief that US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy, and I'm perfectly willing with temporary issues if this means at least some of the long term problems will be improved. So overall... cautiously optimistic? Long term at least. Is that cheering?
And since the grandparent also mentioned visas - here at least I have a pretty simple opinion. Congress should step up and reform immigration laws. They've avoided doing this for decades, and it's kinda useless to put the blame anywhere else. (for context I'm not american, and my country just had the visa waiver canceled this year by the current administration, so I'm actually on the other side of the fence).
searine · 4m ago
>I am moderately pessimistic about the state of research because I do hear things I don't like, but this is compensated by my belief that US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy, and I'm perfectly willing with temporary issues if this means at least some of the long term problems will be improved
I am confused how 'burn it all down' will solve any problems, let alone long term ones.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation works. The 'deal' of basic science in the US is that the government funds broadly and without prejudice. Topics are decided by experts and overseen by experts. These experts are taking large pay-cuts (compared to their worth in industry) to have the freedom to investigate their own interests. In return the public gets a vast amount of R&D on the cheap, much of which doesn't seem to have immediate ROI, but as we well know, has tremendous long term ROI.
Yes sometimes those ideas are dead-ends or don't replicate. Yes sometimes fraud/plagiarism happens. Yes sometimes people research minorities or marginalized people. Certain interests have made some people believe that these are symptoms of a broken system when in reality they are all just parts of the scientific process and freedom of thought. These interests mostly have used culture war issues as a wedge to defund science broadly.
So no, we should not destroy tomorrows cancer treatment (which could save you or the ones you love) because some tech-oligarch wants more money/power.
1over137 · 29m ago
>And for some reason a contingent of HN is cheering it on.
Seems easily understood. Only 5% of humanity are USians, for the rest, 'your loss is our gain'. Where cowmix wishes for all the brilliant minds to come to the US, the countries that lose those people call it a 'brain drain', and the reduction of that brain drain is most welcome.
kstrauser · 1h ago
In any sizable group, you're going to find a vocal jackass minority. But here, at least, they genuinely seem to be the minority.
anonymars · 2h ago
Ultimately that's one reason why the US got the atomic bomb and not the Nazis. Ironic.
cityofdelusion · 2h ago
Realistically speaking, Germany was never on track to produce atomic weapons before their war economy was obliterated by the allies. The program was not taken seriously or had proper investment. The war machine was already severely starved of resources prior to their even more significant land losses in 1944. I honestly can’t even think of an alternate (realistic) timeline where they achieve a delivery system for atomic weaponry.
southernplaces7 · 39m ago
The delivery system would have been mostly irrelevant if they'd gotten the bomb on time. Having even one functional nuke at any time at all before or just shortly after June 6th 1944 and dropping it on London or even around the Normandy beachhead (well within German reach even in 1944) would have pretty much killed the D-Day landings stone dead immediately, and that was something they certainly plausibly could have done if it had been taken seriously by the leadership early enough. The V-Weapons program alone cost MUCH more than the Manhattan Project, for example, and it was (despite being technically incredible for its time) a total waste of resources under the circumstances.
The Germans also spent so much money on so many absurd things that had they simply directed it more precisely to the bomb at an earlier time, cost at least wouldn't have been a limitation. Even as things stand historically, they created a number of completely cutting-edge weapons despite all the catastrophic problems you describe, so much so that the US, USSR and UK all spent years after the war, largely cribbing off what the Nazis' R&D had already developed to some extent.
oldpersonintx2 · 2h ago
could people stop posting the same thing over and over again? its been said a million times and all of the upvotes were handed out
repeating the same karma-farming copy isn't even mid at this point
try reddit
amanaplanacanal · 1h ago
Sorry you don't like the discussion.
yieldcrv · 2h ago
The US isn't the only country with prestigious universities, that partially function on a form of social taxpayer welfare, that innovate in the medical field
In fact, some other developed nations do it in far greater percentages of the universities' independent revenue.
Many also have quite comparatively easy immigration paths for both students and workers.
beowulfey · 2h ago
The scale of the US research program, compared to the rest of the world, is about an order of magnitude difference.
MisterMower · 1h ago
You’re right, those bright, talented kids will just give up and quit their careers because US government funding has been reduced for research in their field. It’s so sad that the only way innovation can happen is if it’s funded by the government.
tracker1 · 2h ago
I know I may get some flack for this. But IMO, you shouldn't make waves when you are a VISA guest in another country. It's just a bad idea all around. There's every reason to actively avoid getting politically involved. While I realize that US higher education is particularly motivated towards activism, protests and the like. Historically accepting even foreign nationals in such activity. It's still just a bad idea for non-citizens in any country to do so.
I do think a lot of grant funding will cycle back around. There's every reason for commercial sourcing to become a larger portion of university funding as well as university funding directly from endowments considering the profit motivations in both cases. I think it's far from dead, just changing.
beowulfey · 1h ago
1) Why would companies pay for basic research? They used to get that research for free.
2) Very few schools have endowments that are large enough to support current faculty research costs; even Harvard can only support all research off their endowment for about a year.
3) Endowments are now taxed, so they will have even less available for research.
MisterMower · 1h ago
1) Because ROI on that investment is still positive, even if it used to be “free”.
2) Endowments aren’t the only way to fund research, and not all research is equally valuable. Some is probably negative value, given the replication crisis.
3) Investment income from the endowment is taxed at a maximum of 8%. If that’s enough to break the US university research machine, I’m not sure it was ever working in the first place.
beowulfey · 22m ago
Thanks for your comments.
The ROI is not positive because there is no guarantee basic science will lead to any money-making outcome. That's not how basic science works and it is never how it worked, but basic science is absolutely crucial for advancing tech. If you can convince shareholders that it is e.g. worth investigating unusual crystal structures with no intended product in mind then people will gladly share some grants with you to edit so you can work some of that magic. It's just not feasible, no company would pay for that, but sometimes it leads to important discoveries that change the game.
And I only mentioned endowments because the parent of my comment did, but again, the important point is that endowments are not intended to entirely fund the research machine, and never will.
snake42 · 51m ago
The cumulative ROI for basic research is positive, but I don't think that is true for many individual research efforts, which is what a company is more likely to support. An individual company seems much less likely to benefit enough from an aggregate pool of research that they will actually contribute. Look at the state of open source software with respect to company investment in maintainers.
tracker1 · 1h ago
1) because they're the ones who most benefit from it. Because they still need the research itself, even if someone else isn't paying for it.
2) Harvard has a $54 billion endowment and spends $6.4 billion a year, that doesn't include tuition and fees, that's just what they have in the bank.
3) Actually spending the money is tax deductible and better for the economy.
beowulfey · 12m ago
Endowment funds are not a checking account, they are not just cash on hand for universities to spend as they please. They could certainly liquidate, but then each year their disbursement would get lower. There is no situation where they could continue operating as they do now.
See my other comment on the likelihood that any corporation would want to pay for basic science. When would any company choose to fund something that would not guarantee a return on investment? It goes against the nature of the goals of a corporation. I would love to know of for-profit examples of this. I'm sure there are a few, but I doubt there are many.
tsol · 2h ago
I don't think everyone that got their funding pulled made waves. Terrance Tao for example had funding pulled simply for being associated with the wrong school.
tracker1 · 1h ago
I'm not saying they did... I'm simply commenting on the chilling effects portion of the post I replied to. In that becoming politically involved in a foreign nation on a temporary visa is just a bad idea. It really shouldn't be a controversial opinion.
There are a LOT of countries that have much harsher penalties for speaking out than having one's visa revoked. For that matter, I'm not endorsing one opinion or another on any given topic here, only pointing out that it's a bad idea.
wrs · 1h ago
That absolutely is a controversial opinion. The prohibition against government reprisal for speech acts is the first thing in the Bill of Rights! That’s one of the genuinely exceptional things about the U.S., or at least it was until we broke it.
tracker1 · 1h ago
A lot of privileges/rights are limited to citizens in the US in different ways. Why would any government welcome a subversive, foreign influence? Should it be any surprise that the result is similar to what happens when a spy is caught?
amanaplanacanal · 1h ago
The first amendment is NOT limited to citizens in the US. It just isn't. Why would it be? Free speech, free press, and freedom of religion applies to everybody.
tracker1 · 20m ago
The Visa application, process and requirements themselves limit activities to persons in the US on a Visa. In particular, it limits subversive activities as well as speaking and/or acting out against US policies.
tracker1 · 43m ago
And what happens to spies caught in the US? Again, why would you expect something significantly different for a subversive foreign adversary in the nation on a Visa?
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences."
amanaplanacanal · 33m ago
I think you misunderstand the line you quoted. That means consequences from other private citizens, not from the government.
tracker1 · 27m ago
And you didn't answer the question I asked more than once. Why would you expect a significantly different result for a subversive foreign influence on a Visa vs an otherwise disclosed spy? There are plenty of limitations to Visa holders.
What the heck? In the US, free speech is guaranteed in the constitution. Of course people can make waves! The idea that people should just go along with things and not make their voices heard is completely unamerican.
tracker1 · 20m ago
It is expressly limited by the Visa application, process and requirements that are agreed to as part of obtaining a Visa to enter the US.
searine · 1h ago
Corporations were funding scientific innovation indirectly through corporate taxes and they fought with every fiber of their being to cut those taxes because they didn't want to pay for it.
If you think they will suddenly have a change of heart and start funding scientific discovery not just indirectly, but directly, then I have a bridge to sell you.
tracker1 · 1h ago
If they want to remain competitive and advance, they certainly will.
ksenzee · 1h ago
And we know companies certainly do what's best for their long-term growth and survival, rather than prioritizing short-term profits. We certainly don't need to worry about innovation grinding to a halt, and scientists leaving the field, while companies figure out the new normal.
Teever · 3h ago
> The standard treatment for this type of bladder cancer is an immunotherapy drug, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin,
Can anyone explain why the vaccine for TB works to treat bladder cancer?
QuercusMax · 2h ago
This "drug" is a weakened form of the bacterium, which apparently stimulates immune response. So I guess it works for both TB and bladder cancer just by getting your immune system to notice something is amiss?
imranq · 2h ago
Turning it off and then on again works in a lot of surprising places
tiahura · 3h ago
“almost half the patients were cancer-free a year later.”
mcswell · 1h ago
More than half would be nice, but: these tests were run on "individuals with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose cancer had previously resisted treatment." One could expect that it would be even more effective on patients whose cancers were not resistant to treatment.
chiph · 1h ago
One of the things I learned going through my own treatment (prostate) was that everyone's cancer is different. Which makes sense if you think about the variability in malignant cell growth.
So something that cures half the patients and only requires an office or outpatient visit every few weeks (no surgery, no radiation) is astounding. This result will likely lead to further research using this approach.
onlyrealcuzzo · 2h ago
That's one way of looking at the glass half empty.
If half of people get rid of cancer for 1 year that is still outstanding - ESPECIALLY if the majority of those remain cancer free for quite some time after.
codr7 · 27m ago
If we wanted patients to survive long term, then maybe we could try a treatment that doesn't destroy their immune system in the process.
tptacek · 10m ago
Invent it and your grandchildren will retire rich.
- "TAR-200 is a miniature, pretzel-shaped drug-device duo containing a chemotherapy drug, gemcitabine, which is inserted into the bladder through a catheter. Once inside the bladder, the TAR-200 slowly and consistently releases the gemcitabine into the organ for three weeks per treatment cycle."
- Phase 2 Clinical Trial
- 85 patients with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer
- "treated patients with TAR-200 every three weeks for six months, and then four times a year for the next two years"
- 70/85 patients—the cancer disappeared and still gone 1yr later in almost 50% patients
- FDA granted TAR-200 a New Drug Application Priority Review
- Johnson & Johnson manufactures TAR-200
> ...for individuals with high-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer whose cancer had previously resisted treatment
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S107814392...
The US is literally crushing both innovation and talent at the same time. Think of all the brilliant minds who can’t—or won’t bother—coming here to test their ideas because visas are paused, revoked, or delayed for political reasons. Worse, proposed H-1B changes favoring only high-wage workers could shut out fresh grads entirely. At this rate, funding is being starved for political concessions, and the next generation of genius scientists might be too scared—or flat-out blocked—from studying and innovating here.
And it’s not just foreign students—even native US students are looking at science careers that might not exist in a few years. My wife is an accountant for research grants, and ALL her PIs are still in a daze, trying to process what’s happening.
Again… depressing AF. THe US based science/research pipeline is toast.
When you write comments like this, you are literally begging people to take the other side of your argument, which will inevitably have less to do with the technical details of why TB treatments are first-line therapies for bladder cancer and more to do with the First Amendment and visa protections. It's a way of having exactly the same tedious argument on every story, no matter what the story is about.
We are breaking the innovation machine and pretending discoveries will just keep happening.
I am moderately pessimistic about the state of research because I do hear things I don't like, but this is compensated by my belief that US academia has a ridiculous amount of institutional entropy, and I'm perfectly willing with temporary issues if this means at least some of the long term problems will be improved. So overall... cautiously optimistic? Long term at least. Is that cheering?
And since the grandparent also mentioned visas - here at least I have a pretty simple opinion. Congress should step up and reform immigration laws. They've avoided doing this for decades, and it's kinda useless to put the blame anywhere else. (for context I'm not american, and my country just had the visa waiver canceled this year by the current administration, so I'm actually on the other side of the fence).
I am confused how 'burn it all down' will solve any problems, let alone long term ones.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation works. The 'deal' of basic science in the US is that the government funds broadly and without prejudice. Topics are decided by experts and overseen by experts. These experts are taking large pay-cuts (compared to their worth in industry) to have the freedom to investigate their own interests. In return the public gets a vast amount of R&D on the cheap, much of which doesn't seem to have immediate ROI, but as we well know, has tremendous long term ROI.
Yes sometimes those ideas are dead-ends or don't replicate. Yes sometimes fraud/plagiarism happens. Yes sometimes people research minorities or marginalized people. Certain interests have made some people believe that these are symptoms of a broken system when in reality they are all just parts of the scientific process and freedom of thought. These interests mostly have used culture war issues as a wedge to defund science broadly.
So no, we should not destroy tomorrows cancer treatment (which could save you or the ones you love) because some tech-oligarch wants more money/power.
Seems easily understood. Only 5% of humanity are USians, for the rest, 'your loss is our gain'. Where cowmix wishes for all the brilliant minds to come to the US, the countries that lose those people call it a 'brain drain', and the reduction of that brain drain is most welcome.
The Germans also spent so much money on so many absurd things that had they simply directed it more precisely to the bomb at an earlier time, cost at least wouldn't have been a limitation. Even as things stand historically, they created a number of completely cutting-edge weapons despite all the catastrophic problems you describe, so much so that the US, USSR and UK all spent years after the war, largely cribbing off what the Nazis' R&D had already developed to some extent.
repeating the same karma-farming copy isn't even mid at this point
try reddit
In fact, some other developed nations do it in far greater percentages of the universities' independent revenue.
Many also have quite comparatively easy immigration paths for both students and workers.
I do think a lot of grant funding will cycle back around. There's every reason for commercial sourcing to become a larger portion of university funding as well as university funding directly from endowments considering the profit motivations in both cases. I think it's far from dead, just changing.
2) Very few schools have endowments that are large enough to support current faculty research costs; even Harvard can only support all research off their endowment for about a year.
3) Endowments are now taxed, so they will have even less available for research.
2) Endowments aren’t the only way to fund research, and not all research is equally valuable. Some is probably negative value, given the replication crisis.
3) Investment income from the endowment is taxed at a maximum of 8%. If that’s enough to break the US university research machine, I’m not sure it was ever working in the first place.
The ROI is not positive because there is no guarantee basic science will lead to any money-making outcome. That's not how basic science works and it is never how it worked, but basic science is absolutely crucial for advancing tech. If you can convince shareholders that it is e.g. worth investigating unusual crystal structures with no intended product in mind then people will gladly share some grants with you to edit so you can work some of that magic. It's just not feasible, no company would pay for that, but sometimes it leads to important discoveries that change the game.
And I only mentioned endowments because the parent of my comment did, but again, the important point is that endowments are not intended to entirely fund the research machine, and never will.
2) Harvard has a $54 billion endowment and spends $6.4 billion a year, that doesn't include tuition and fees, that's just what they have in the bank.
3) Actually spending the money is tax deductible and better for the economy.
See my other comment on the likelihood that any corporation would want to pay for basic science. When would any company choose to fund something that would not guarantee a return on investment? It goes against the nature of the goals of a corporation. I would love to know of for-profit examples of this. I'm sure there are a few, but I doubt there are many.
There are a LOT of countries that have much harsher penalties for speaking out than having one's visa revoked. For that matter, I'm not endorsing one opinion or another on any given topic here, only pointing out that it's a bad idea.
"Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences."
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
If you think they will suddenly have a change of heart and start funding scientific discovery not just indirectly, but directly, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Can anyone explain why the vaccine for TB works to treat bladder cancer?
So something that cures half the patients and only requires an office or outpatient visit every few weeks (no surgery, no radiation) is astounding. This result will likely lead to further research using this approach.
If half of people get rid of cancer for 1 year that is still outstanding - ESPECIALLY if the majority of those remain cancer free for quite some time after.