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from the seems-better-then-what-we-are-doing-now dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
An immunotherapy drug has been described as a potential "game-changer" in promising results presented at the European Cancer Congress.
In a study of head and neck cancer, more patients taking nivolumab survived for longer compared with those who were treated with chemotherapy. In another study, combining nivolumab with another drug shrank tumours in advanced kidney cancer patients.
Immunotherapy works by harnessing the immune system to destroy cancer cells.
Advanced head and neck cancer has very poor survival rates.
In a trial of more than 350 patients, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 36% treated with the immunotherapy drug nivolumab were alive after one year compared with 17% who received chemotherapy. Patients also experienced fewer side effects from immunotherapy.
The benefits were more pronounced in patients whose tumours had tested positive for HPV (human papillomavirus). These patients survived an average of 9.1 months with nivolumab and 4.4 months with chemotherapy.
Normally, this group of patients, with advanced or treatment-resistant tumours, are expected to live less than six months.
Early data from a study of 94 patients with advanced kidney cancer showed that the double hit of nivolumab and ipilimumab resulted in a significant reduction in the size of tumours in 40% of patients. Of these patients, one in 10 had no sign of cancer remaining. This compares with 5% of patients showing tumour reduction after standard therapy.
[...] As yet, nivolumab has only been approved for treating skin cancer and in June it became one of the fastest medicines ever approved for NHS use, in combination with ipilimumab, for the same cancer. Nivolumab and ipilimumab both work by interrupting the chemical signals that cancers use to convince the immune system they are healthy tissue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:00PM
As one of the originals to this site, and one who threw one of the first fuckBeta on the day of revolution, I can say I've been let down by this community. This is not a troll. There are good people here, but there are too few regular posters that really want to say something interesting or informative.
Now days I more or less live at Y-combinator Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/ [ycombinator.com]
The moderations there is good. There is a ton of talent, and signal to noise is very high. The articles are timely, but also older but interesting stories make it to the top fairly often--which is great.
If Soylent News has a future over the long-term, it will need to grow...and to do that they need to avoid flame wars and attract expertise. --buswolley
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:18PM
I left ycombinator over shadow-banning before Soylent even existed. Shadow-banning is the most heartless and inhumane 'fix' for spam that I have ever seen. I saw one guy who had been posting for months without any idea that no one else could see what he had to say. Apparently he got shadow-banned because just one of his posts was about his own project. I read it (you can tell what post the admins don't like because all of the prior posts stay visible even without "show hidden posts" enabled) and it sure didn't stand out to me and I hate duplicitous self-promotion), but he got no warning or any kind of notification at all. Just silently censored. It doesn't get more arbitrary than that.
The guy had literally put in days of man-hours making a positive contribution to the site before I told him he was being censored. Even worse, if you should figure out that you are shadow-banned (by deleting cookies and then trying to read stories in which you've posted comments and noticing they aren't there) there is no process to remedy it. You have to get in contact with the admins via a poorly publicised email address (hope you message doesn't go in their spam folder) and beg them to reconsider.
There are a fuckton of loud idiots on soylentnews that get up-modded because there are too many other credulous idiots here. But at least the place isn't run by autistic robots. I keep thinking about walking away from here, but no way in hell would I go back to ycombinator.
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:49PM
I am fairly new to that site, so I haven't heard of the banhammering. I'll keep it in mind.
Thanks