Frog-derived gut bacterium eradicates tumors in mice

tristanj

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/

aa-jv

Wow, this is humorous .. whats next, the eye of the newt cures wistfulness? I sure hope so. Seriously though, we are living in an era where the more the science broadens its horizons, the more it just looks like plain ol' witchcraft. I'm hoping there'll be some uses for figs we haven't thought of, next ..

cedws

Bryan Johnson might be interested in IV’ing frog gut bacteria.

functionmouse

Mice are having a great year

pennomi

The AI- generated diagram is plausible but horribly wrong the more you look at it. Thank goodness the original paper didn’t use that, it’s just this awful blog post that makes the research look like slop.

jimnotgym

100 years of trying everything to kill bacteria, and we find they can be jolly useful

ballenf

I wonder if animals have always seen frogs as unpleasant medicine they need to eat occasionally. My dog would happily scarf them down if I let him. Or does it have to be IV administered? Also who thinks -- "hmm we've found a new random bacteria --- let's give a bunch of tumors to mice and then IV inject this random thing into them!"? There must have been something about the microbe that gave them a hint. Maybe it's in the cited original article and was left out of the blog post.

petesergeant

The blog articles (6 weeks old) describes this as new, but the linked paper is closer to 6 months old. Random report of the same bacteria giving a chemo patient sepsis: https://www.cureus.com/articles/342789-sepsis-caused-by-ewin... which seems unfortunate

BigTTYGothGF

Before anybody gets too excited they should check out some of the other reporting on that site, such as "COVID-19 Vaccine is the Culprit in Majority Found Dead after Injection" and "Trump Signed a Directive to Accelerate 6G Deployment to Operate "Implantable Technologies"

VMG

Crank blog, very skeptical

tiffanyh

To give more credit to this blog post, the NIH published findings on this same subject last year. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12710904/

oofbey

The blog is highly suspect, but the study is real. That said it’s not a big deal. Curing cancer in a mouse model is not at all uncommon in new therapies. Mouse models like this are vastly easier to treat than real world cancer for a bunch of reasons. Fully curing mice is the baseline for a treatment to even be considered for further evaluation. And even then very few therapies end up succeeding in humans - low single digit percent. So yes, another possible treatment. But not at all a breakthrough.

jmorenoamor

Sorry but the site looks too sensationalist for me. Is there any other source?

romx-cell

We are destroying ecosystems so fast that there will be no frogs and we will regret it. The same with all the nature

tekacs

I'm astounded that this thread doesn't contain at least one 'eat the frog' joke. https://asana.com/resources/eat-the-frog

gus_massa

Previus discussion (from the university press release) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306894 (498 points | 6 months ago | 140 comments) I'll rehash my comment They used mice, because they are good for early tries. The researchers had 9 bacterias and only 1 was successful. Experiments in mice are cheaper and have less ethical problems than experiments in humans. (Hey! They even injected the cancer cells in mice and waited a week until it grow. Nobody will approve something like that in humans.) The title claims that the tumos were eradicated. The title hides that it was a small tumor they injected in the mice and more importantly that it disappeared for two weeks until the experiment ended. It's difficult to guess if it will be useful for humans with bigger tumors because they are harder to detect, and it would work for a interesting enough period like 5 years. There is also and old comment by octaane https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308732 I'll quote it partially: > Several things trigger my bullshit meter. Quote: >> "This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agents)" > PD-L1 monoclonal antibodies are only effective against cancers that are PD-L1 positive. [...] Many tumor types are not PD-l1 positive. > Doxy is an ancient SOC chemo. > [...]

GaProgMan

So the Bursar at Unseen University was on to something this whole time? And we all thought was mad!

andrewstuart

Mice are so goddam healthy. They get all the good medical breakthroughs.

frellus

I kid you not, there was a movie with Sean Connery called "Medicine Man" (1992) with this exact same theme. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=fn_t_1 In it, Connery finds what looks to be a rare natural cure to all cancer in the Rain Forest (spoiler: not a frog, but equally as weird), and is literally battling the nearby deforesting and bulldozers. For a Sean Connery movie it was bizarre (As a young teen, I saw it in the theaters.. quite a bit less action than a 007 movie but good drama and dramatic Sean Connery acting).