I have already seen legacy projects that were designed using Rational Rose, but for some reason I thought it was only a commercial name, not an actual system. Thanks, I learned something today !
Yup. Cutting out as much as possible is going to continue to be part of the standard of care for the foreseeable future, too.
But I don't think that synthesizing some custom mRNA per-patient is at all cost prohibitive.
Formulating a lot of different batches of mRNA in lipid nanoparticles made with different mRNA might be a little complicated now, but I don't think it's an intrinsically terrible manufacturing problem.
It'll be better if this kind of technique is turns out to be applicable to more cancers, because you need to reach enough doses for economies of scale and manufacturing optimization to really kick in.
The immune system reacts to molecules on the surfaces of cells, not macro-level properties.
And even if you can get the immune system to react to the tumor, it's better if you've removed 99% of it, so that there's less opportunity for the tumor to evolve away from the immune reaction.
(Or, in the likely case that you just slow down growth of the tumor a lot: better to start out at a 99% smaller size).
Not a doctor (or even a biologist), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a heavy lift to expect the immune system to break down a fruit-sized lump, or the lymphatic system to transport it away. So you may want to remove most of the mass physically, and just leave the immune system to mop up the remainder so it doesn't regrow.
Yeah, I would imagine they would do the minimally invasive surgey to remove as much tumor as possible and then do the immune treatment after. Maybe it would make sense to a biopsy and just the immune treatment, but my guess is it would be mkre effective the first way. At least in my personal experience with this kind of thing I would think this could improve survival rates and reduce disabilities caused or worsened by surgery by not having to achive clean margin removal of the tumor. But who knows. Maybe in the future they can extract enough tumor DNA from blood draws to create the target.
The treatment is probably more effective if you capture most/all of the tumor you can. For one, maybe that alone is good enough. For two, theres the fact that many tumors are a heterogenous mixture of populations of cancer cells rather than one clonal mass of cells that are genetically identical. There is a chance you might "miss" and fail to capture a particularly malignant population that might be rare at the time of surgery but might have distant metastasis before long.
If birth rates are quickly falling, the debt will have to be repaid by an always smaller population, it seems it will make matter worse. (Unless we find out a magical productivity gain that can be heavily taxed by government)
I am working on medical device software, processes are terrible, tech stack is not really up to date, but at least, I sometimes feel that I am helping people down the line.
Yeah, never mind that it's a bad idea to have a mine under a lake, it's an even worse idea to authorize drilling for oil in the lake over the mine. I would love to read a report on how that came about. But apparently there's little hope to find that out: according to Wikipedia, "The Mine Safety and Health Administration released a report on the disaster in August 1981 which exhaustively documented the event but stopped short of identifying an official reason for the disaster."
Actually, salt mines are subject to collapse of the overlying rock, which can create sinkholes at the surface as the collapse propagates upwards. So putting them under lakes means you're not risking destroying someones home.
How do I know this? There's a major salt mine under Lansing, New York (just north of Ithaca) that's doing most of its expansion under Cayuga Lake for just this reason.
(Cargill has another mine under Lake Erie, and deliberately flooded a mine in Louisiana recently. They're trying to get out of the salt mining business, though.)
There's a freight spur line on the west side of Ithaca that is the sole remaining rail connection to the city. Its sole purpose these days is carrying salt from that mine (it used to also carry coal to a power plant up the side of the lake, but that plant was shut down.)
If you want to read of another fun fuck up, read about the time mankind set light to the coal seam under Centralia in 1962. It's predicted to burn for another 250 years.
One of the ways that was planned to mine undersea coal was in situ gasification: basically, start a Centralia-like fire, pump down oxygen and steam, and recover the mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen for use as a fuel. If it's undersea then the risk of uncontrolled introduction of air (as occurs at Centralia) is reduced.
The famous Hashima island (also called "Battleship island") in Japan near Nagasaki was an undersea coal mine - the network of tunnels even connected to another mining island nearby.
I don't think they ever had problems with flooding from the sea, but it was certainly dangerous enough to work there due to regular mining and industrial hazards. Also apparently it was very hot and humid in the mine.
The claim on Wikipedia seems to be they have not done so to the satisfaction of the other unesco members who had to vote for its inclusion as a heritage site.
This has also happened naturally all over in places around the world. There is one in Australia that allegedly will burn for longer than a million years.
I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them.
So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
