Eradicate breast cancer? The hunt for a vaccine looks promising
Imagine a future where far fewer women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and women with a family history of breast cancer don’t have to make the difficult, even devastating choice to get a preventive mastectomy. Instead, women would get a series of shots that teach their immune systems how to quash breast cancer before it becomes a problem.
A decade or two ago, that future would have sounded fantastical. But in the last six months, multiple clinical trials have brought that much closer to reality. These studies are very early — so far only a handful of people have even gotten the shots.
Yet the arrival of not just one but several breast cancer vaccine studies is an encouraging sign of the amazing progress researchers are making in harnessing the immune system to not just battle cancer, but prevent it in the first place. The potential for treating breast cancer — the most common form of cancer among US women — is huge.
“We are literally vaccinating healthy people now,” says Susan Domchek, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is leading a trial of a preventive breast cancer vaccine. “It’s not just pie in the sky, we’re actually doing it.”
She is one of several researchers making serious headway toward that ambitious goal. Decades of work to understand how to train the immune system to spot tumors has culminated in a cluster of clinical studies of breast cancer vaccines that aim to be truly preventive.
Eventually, “there will be vaccines available for every different type of breast cancer,” says Nora Disis, director of the University of Washington’s Cancer Vaccine Institute. Disis, an expert in breast cancer immunology, believes chances are high that vaccines to treat or prevent recurrence of the disease will arrive within the next five years. And eventually, vaccines could be available to keep women with a genetic risk of developing cancer from ever having to deal with it.
One early sign of the vaccines’ promise came last November, when Disis’s team published results from a years-long study of a vaccine that teaches the immune system to spot a mutated form of the protein HER2, a common driver of breast cancer. Researchers vaccinated 66 women who were either in remission following treatment for their breast cancer or had slow-growing tumors.
The study was designed to prove the shots were safe, but it also yielded a hopeful signal the approach is working: Women in the study had a 50% chance of dying from the disease within five years
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There may be a tipoff here or there that a human wasn’t involved (language like “I cannot complete this prompt”). More important, there are false claims, such as celebrity death hoaxes and fabricated events.
Celebritiesdeaths. com, which posts generic obituaries and news on famous figures who have supposedly died, published an April 2023 article titled “Biden dead. Harris acting President, address 9 a.m. ET.” The article began, “BREAKING: The White House has reported that
Joe Biden has passed away peacefully in his sleep …”
As Bloomberg News wrote, Newsguard’s work is “raising questions about how the technology may supercharge established fraud techniques,” and exploit so-called programmatic advertising placed by ad tech firms. That means large amounts of advertising can wind up on suspect “news” sites due to a few simple prompts that created the site. The tech firms and advertisers are probably unwitting victims.
“It seems to me that AI chatbots generating news will finally realize that (former Donald Trump aide) Kellyanne Conway’s vision of alternative facts by automating misinformation,” said Rich Neimand, a Washington political and corporate strategist.
New AI tools are “a toadstool masquerading as a morel,” or edible fungus, Neimand said. “It is poisonous in a society that lacks emotional intelligence and operates on relative ethics.”
For Chicago political consultant Tom Bowen, the new tools sharply lower the barrier to create dubious websites in political campaigns.
Such ideologically driven sites, generally hiding the identities of their sponsors, are proliferating.
As with pornography, “propagandists are eager to embrace new technologies and often move faster than traditional journalists,” Jeremy Gilbert said. Gilbert is the Knight Chair in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and
formerly a digital strategist at The Washington Post.
It is why Newsguard and others “can play a valuable role in determining valuable sources of trusted news and information.”
“The same algorithms that generate text should be capable of identifying generated text,” Gilbert said. “AI companies that offer these generative tools should also offer complementary detection systems so propaganda and clickbait will be harder to spread.”
Like the confused captives of “Silo,” one hopes technology is a liberating friend, not a deceiving foe.
Jim Warren is the executive editor of Newsguard and the former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.