Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. Today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer. Cancer’s power lives in its camouflage. The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T cells serving as the expert snipers, hunting down antigens and taking them out. But cancer kills so many of us because it looks so much like us. Pancreatic cancer is so deadly in part because it's expert at hiding itself from the immune system. Now, here’s the good news. This might be the brightest moment for progress in pancreatic cancer research in decades—and possibly ever. In the past few years, scientists have developed new drugs that target the key gene mutation responsible for out of control cell growth. Recently, a team of scientists at Oregon Health and Science University claimed to have developed a blood test that is 85 percent accurate at early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer, which is absolutely critical given how advanced the cancer is by the time it’s typically caught. And last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper. Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to the treatment saw results that boggle the mind: 75 percent were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment. Not just alive, which would be its own minor miracle. But cancer-free. The mRNA vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and won. Today’s guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran. The concept of a personalized cancer vaccine is still unproven at scale. But if it works, the potential is enormous. But again: Cancer does not exist, as a singular disease. Cancer is a category of rare diseases, many of which are exquisitely specific to the molecular mosaic of the patient. Cancers are personal. Perhaps in a few years, our cures for cancers will be equally personalized. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Vinod Balachandran Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Cancer Vaccine paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08508-4 P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: The Abundance Book Tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Hey, it's Bill Simmons letting you know that we are covering the White Lotus on the Prestige TV podcast and the Ringer TV YouTube channel every Sunday night this season with Mally Rubin and Joanna Robinson.
Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.
Subscribe to the Prestige podcast feed. Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch these podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus, let's go.
Hey folks, first a programming note. I'm going to be on the road traveling around the country talking about Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Ezra Klein, for much of the month of March and April. We'll be in New York City, then Cambridge, D.C., L.A.,
Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, and then back to New York with maybe a couple other book events added throughout the spring and early summer. I'm incredibly excited for this book to be live in the world. I'm incredibly excited to talk about this book. We're going to include a link to the Simon & Schuster abundance tour in the episode notes.
What this means, though, for the show is that I'm just going to be really busy for the next five weeks. So we're going to reduce the frequency of Plain English episodes to once a week through about the middle of April. I expect that around then I'll be able to have time to do two shows a week because I love doing the show.
So wanted to make sure that you knew we're going down to about one episode a week for the next few weeks as I go around the country to talk about abundance. And if you're in, especially Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Seattle, Chicago, New York, I know that there are a few tickets left in those cities. We would love to see you there.
Today, a landmark cancer vaccine and the race to solve one of the hardest problems in science. There is no such thing as a disease called cancer. Because cancer is not a disease, singular. It's not COVID or measles. Cancer is a category, an umbrella term covering hundreds and possibly thousands of what are better thought of as rare diseases. Take, for example, the thing we call lung cancer.
Lung cancer as a category is very common. But there are at least a hundred distinct types of lung cancer, each unique in their molecular identity, proteins, or genetic mutations. It's sometimes said that the world is waiting on the cure for cancer, but this sentiment is off by one letter. The world is waiting on the cures for cancers.
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