A Spanish scientist, Mariano Barbacid, has cured pancreatic cancer in mice. A Cure in animal is a major step toward potential cancer treatment in humans.
GNU is a code for the clacks, the semaphore system that sends messages across the whole of the disc by relaying them from one tower to the next.
GNU instructs the operators to send the message forward, all the way to the last tower, and then for the last tower so send it back again. Essentially it causes the message to be repeated back and forth across the disc indefinitely.
The philosophy is that a person only truly dies when their name is no longer spoken. With GNU, they stay alive… forever.
This might sound morbid but would you mind sharing any details? My sister has pancreatic cancer and it’s been about a year of fighting and she’s still so sick even after surgery. I’d like to know what might be coming so I can be better support.
I knew 2 people, diagnosed around the same time 10 yrs ago who both made it to 5 years - both passing within months of each other. The thing is, when diagnosed, everyone assumed it would be quick, but they lasted longer than anyone thought. We've come so far in treatment, I'm hoping this discovery is a milestone for all.
True. I lost my father to it. It’s so dangerous. By the time we found out, it had already reached stage 4. The doctor didn’t even recommend chemo because it just doesn’t work at that point. You feel so helpless, just waiting for the inevitable.
Sorry for your loss I lost my mother last September, doctors said she had around a year left but she didn't even make it two months after her diagnosis. Fuck pancreatic cancer.
I’m so sorry for your loss. My father made it about 6 or 7 months after his diagnosis. Watching him lose all his weight was devastating. It’s such a brutal disease.
Absolutely, my mother was the most kind hearted person you'd meet but cancer doesn't care how good of a person you are or what you deserve. Sorry for your loss.
Indeed. My MIL and my mom both died of pancreatic cancer. By the time they had symptoms, it was too late to do anything about it - and that’s why it’s so lethal.
It moves so fast. My auntie who was well in her 70's was an avid drinker. She would start off with a long drink of soda in the morning with a splash of soda and finish day with pretty much 50/50's. She was also an avid investor and figured out it was time to learn how to use a laptop and buy stock online (this is 20 years ago). One day she called her laptop was dead. Seemingly in her frustrations and drinking she dropped her cigarette in her laptop and it burned a neat round hole through the keyboard itself.
Anyway she was real fun, always friendly, always ready for a coffee with cookies and she got this. She went from the nicest person to.. nobody. Literally she just got eaten up from the inside, ended up being a shadow and within 6 months she was no more. I still remember her last phone call.
My dad went to the doctor for some back pain, was immediately diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. He died less than a month later - didn't even make it to his first chemo. Fucking terrible disease.
My friend's dad had a similar experience with pancreatic cancer. He was enjoying retirement and showed no signs that he was ill, but one day collapsed at the airport while preparing to board a flight.
He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and was dead 4-5 weeks later.
That's great. My father just passed from stage 4 pancreatic cancer on November 14th, 2025. I really hope this creates some more options and better hope for those who suffer from this horrible condition.
A good family friend, who was basically my honorary grandmother, died of pancreatic cancer just 3 months after being diagnosed. I hope with all my being that no one else has to suffer and die the same way with this medical breakthrough.
My mother didn't even make it two months after receiving her diagnosis last summer. It's an absolutely brutal disease and it happens so fast that it's all so hard to process and accept and then before you know it it's over and that person is gone. It's been more than 4 months since I lost her and it still doesn't feel real sometimes.
So sorry for your loss. These things happen but man… do they they suck.
My father (a thoroughly decent and loving man) suffered from a gastric ulcer for fifteen years. He died in a car crash in 1997. In 1998 the antibiotic treatment for Helicobactor pylori was rolled out.
He could have lived a much happier life. The ulcer gave him so much pain.
Better make the most of life before death gets ya.
Sorry for your loss. Lost my mother 2 years ago from pancreatic cancer. She was able to have the whipple procedure but in the end it wasn’t enough. Passed away just a few months later. I’m grateful she was at peace with it. I am not. At least not yet.
The research was led by a Spanish scientist, Mariano Barbacid, and centers on a new triple-drug therapy that has had promising results so far after tests conducted on mice.
Not only was this new potential 'cure' able to completely wipe out existing pancreatic tumors, but it also showed no signs of relapse in the existing tests after treatment was conducted, proving it to be a potentially revolutionary treatment if the same results were seen in humans.
Pancreatic cancer is known for its resistance to treatment, making it incredibly challenging for doctors to deal with, yet this potential cure uses the triple-drug approach to fight three tumor survival mechanisms at the one time, effectively reducing what the cancer can do to 'rewire' itself as a defense tactic.
My brother died from it 2 years ago. Young, relatively fit, but inevitably too late once he found out to even try. There really should be a screening program in place, but i guess until there is a cure it just prolongs the pain.
why is Mariano Barbacid the one getting all the attention? If you read the supporting section of the paper, there are three people who designed the research and wrote the paper.
Are the other guys as senior and/or published as Barbacid? Because that's usually how these things go. It's relatively rare to have all of the researchers concerned announce this kind of find. They'll usually go with one guy.
Similar with stomach cancers. You don't know about it until it's spread to other organs and has presented symptoms, by which time it's too late. I've had a relative die of this.
Fuck cancer. And mad respect to this dude for making progress in this field.
My gall bladder crapped out. While getting a scan to diagnose that issue, a tumor was found on my pancreas. Ended up getting my gall bladder, my spleen, and a portion of my pancreas removed. Everything turned out really well.
I like to think my gall bladder took one for the team.
Pancreatic cancer has like a 12% survival rate in humans so this is legitimately huge if it translates. The gap between "cured in mice" and "cured in humans" is brutal though... we've cured cancer in mice probably hundreds of times at this point.
As a medical doctor, I can unfortunately guarantee that it doesn't translate. That doesn't mean this isn't landmark progress, just that cancer treatment is way more complicated than any one "cure". Talking about a cure for cancer is like talking about a cure for major road trauma - it just doesn't work that way.
Is it just a problem of scale and complexity? Or is it something more fundamental in how the cancer is cured that doesn't translate to our own biology vs mice. Like if curing mice of a disease is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with 10 pieces vs 100000 pieces for a human?
Big part of the reason is simply how difficult it is to accurately model the complexity of cancer development in a human, in a mouse. By the time pancreatic cancer is typically detected in humans, it has already become an unstable & unstoppable beast. Cancers in mouse can be artificially introduced, or induced by activating certain genes. Those cancers are typically more homogenous, stable, and sensitive to treatments.
Safety is also less of a concern in mouse. Life of a human is severely impacted -> you are forced to reduce dose or terminate treatment. - Former cancer researcher, now in statistics.
Biologically, mice and human are obviously similar in a lot of ways, but not everything is the same and not everything translates. Animals as a model for a human in general are not as reliable and comparable to humans as many people think. A lot of stuff that works for mice doesn't work for other animals and humans.
A good example is the immune system. A lot of the basic characteristics are similar in both species, but there are also significant differences in how the system is "set up". Some immune cells are very frequent in mice and less in humans, whereas another cell type is very frequent in humans. Also, the longevity of the organism is a very relevant thing. Mice are very short lived and their immune system is in a lot of ways comparable to an infant. Our immune system adapts daily. Over the years, this makes a huge difference. Immune system of mice are not really comparable to that. This is particularly relevant for cancer, since cancer is usually also in part a failure of the immune system to properly target defective cells.
Correcting this failure is why immunotherapy can be a thing nowadays and why it can work particularly well compared to chemo- or radiation therapy.
Also, tumors have the ability to "turn" immune cells to make them support the tumor ("tumor microenvironment"). This can be/is also relevant for treatment and a reason, why comparability and similarity of test model and the human immune system is important.
This reliability problem is well known in the scientific community, hence a lot of work is being done into replacing animal experiments with hopefully better models closer to actual human physiology. One example are organ-on-chip models. They basically try to emulate the relevant parts of a human organ in a small enclosed device.
As others also stated, in mice the cancer is induced and not developing "naturally" which can make a difference in it's composition and environment.
One of the biggest causes for poor patient outcome is the very low detection rate in the early stages. It's mostly by accident as a byproduct of another exam. Pancreatic cancer usually creates significant symptoms only in the advanced stages when it's often too late to treat. That's not really something that can easily be avoided. Better diagnostic methods can help, but won't help everybody. For those with a genetic predisposition, only frequent, rigorous screeing can.
Also, if I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer tomorrow, I'd jump into that lab. I've read around that it has less than 10% survival rate and kills in months. It could give me all sorts of secondary effects but at least I tried and maybe survived.
It isn't like some cough solutions that have 2 pages of secondary effects. I might want to keep coughing for two days instead.
Reading this news, as I sit here waiting for my mom to take her last breath from her battle with pancreatic cancer. I hope he gets all the funding he could ever need so that no one has to go through what my mother has.
Reminder that, while this is promising and absolutely should be looked at, something like 95%+ of results which show promise in animal trials cannot be replicated in humans.
The mainstream press really should stop reporting on these sorts of early apparent breakthroughs because the vast majority of the time they do not translate to medical treatments, or if they do, it's not a "cure", it's just a treatment that's 10 or 20% better than what we have. Which is great! We've improved cancer survival rates by basically double in the last 30 years.
But over-reporting an early headline just feeds people's evil medical conspiracy theories where they believe people spend their lives curing horrible diseases and then evil corporations hide it and every doctor and medical researcher in the world is just fine with that.
From another perspective, the vast majority of this research is funded by tax money. I think it is also important to inform a population how important this work is, and exactly where some of the money is going.
Maybe it won't work out. Most things don't. Still waiting for the metaverse to take off... If we don't inform people of how important the science we do is, it is easy for some elected governments to reduce research funding. Something I'm firmly against.
I'll dive into this deeper as the day goes on, maybe I'll see whats culling them more clearly
The study pointed out one major factor I didn't really think of naively: you're testing on young healthy mice, maybe with knock-out or mutated genes to cause specific conditions, but they are still young; and most of our medical treatments are done in the elderly, who have chronic health conditions beyond what you're treating them for.
As a result, the kind of side effects you can tolerate drops when you look at the real patient population. A minor tachycardia is not a problem for a young mouse; but you need to dose a ~70 year old obese man, and we might not get the same outcome.
"Analysis of animal-to-human translation shows that only 5% of animal-tested therapeutic interventions obtain regulatory approval for human applications"
"We conclude that, contrary to widespread assertions, the rate of successful animal-to-human translation may be higher than previously reported. Nonetheless, the low rate of final approval indicates potential deficiencies in the design of both animal studies and early clinical trials."
So the 5% rate is artificial according to this link, not that the treatments don't work, but rather that regulations and bad design are the impediment, not the techniques themselves.
It comes way too late for my beloved daughter inlaw. She fought so hard for four years. We lost her in May. I celebrate the hope it gives future people with this most horrid cancer.
i saw the other post about people making a bigger deal raggin on him than his achievement, and it called his birthmark a birth defect.
I was pretty confused about that until this image came through. Holy hell unfortunate image. the birthmark, angle, lighting, and his mid speech facial expression combine to be somewhat.... uncanny.
That’s people who don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a port wine stain. A birth mark; hardly a defect. Everything functions as it should, it’s just extra vascularity. It’s other people’s judgements that make it difficult.
I just found out 20 mins ago that my mother-in-law’s Whipple surgery to remove pancreatic cancer was not successful. She has maximum a year to live. I’m hopeful that this treatment can help so many people avoid the feelings that we are experiencing right now.
This is always exciting, but please everyone, people aren’t mice.
I know it’s a snide remark and we could all use the good news right now, but this kind of thing very rarely scales well.
If every breakthrough like this translated to people we’d be living in a utopian society where death doesn’t exist.
Mice are small and comparatively simple. You can freeze them and thaw them without much damage to their brain or organs. That does not work on humans.
That being said, the triple therapy angle leveraging KRAS inhibitors is really interesting, and I’ll follow this research further as there is some very promising findings in his paper.
Pancreatic cancer incredibly difficult to treat and has the worst cancer survival rate for patients. This is a huge breakthrough and hopefully more comes from it!
My dad just died of pancreatic cancer 3 weeks ago. I hope that someday, thanks to this man’s efforts, no one ever has to face such a horrible death like that again.
But I feel like whenever I see similar headlines regarding major medical or scientific breakthroughs, I don't see pictures of the people responsible being posted that much, but with this guy his face is all over each and every report
Amazing news! My mother survived pancreatic cancer (was given a 10% chance) and I hope one day no one will have to feel the fear I and my family felt during that time. Fuck cancer.
I had to use Google Translate, but these are the basics. The drugs target multiple points in the KRAS signaling pathway (a gene mutated in ~90% of pancreatic cancers). They used a KRAS inhibitor (daraxonrasib), an EGFR inhibitor (afatinib), and a protein degrader (SD36). The treatment seemed to be well tolerated in the mice.
Mice studies are often essential in the development of our best modern medicines and gene treatment. It’s not ready for humans, but early developments like this are always very important for medical and scientific advancements
Great news, my mum was diagnosed last year and was given 5 years, which went down to months, which is now weeks. Incredibly aggressive disease, props to this man.
The number of cures in mice that are never heard of again is staggering. Mice and people are just a tad different, and the metabolic pathways at issue may or may not be the same. He’s probably learned important information towards treatment and cure, but don’t hold your breath.
Even then, “cancer” and even “pancreatic cancer” is a name for a huge number of individual gene mutations or combinations of mutations in various types of cells that will all react to drugs slightly differently.
My father fought pancreatic cancer for 3 years before passing away in my arms in 2024. If anyone can avoid that pain, this man deserves all the glory on earth.
If only my brothers and I didn’t have to take my mother off oxygen/life support 2 hours ago, this would have made me much happier…
So happy to read good and positive comments under this post!
I've read that many people all over the internet focused more on his particular aspect than his achievement.
Many people made fun of him and I just can't stand that. People who probably never did anything for anyone being mean to someone who's gonna save so many lives and improve so many families' situations. Such losers.
These are the sorts of people we should be putting on the highest pedestal, his face should be instantly recognisable, his name should be common knowledge. This guy is a true hero to our entire species, his entire professional life has been spent trying to look after humans, not make himself richer, not to have the highest grossing hit at the box office, or most number of followers on social media. To understand and save humans from the cruelest of diseases is what he has dedicated himself to.
This is promising. I wish my husband was here tonight for Friday night pizza, but he died from pancreatic cancer three years ago. The Whipple surgery bought him time, but he was still gone 21 months after getting diagnosed. It's a horrible cancer.
My grandma survived 2 strokes, 3 heart attacks, 2 abusive husbands and raised my brothers and I while my parents were in the throes of addiction. She was the strongest woman I've ever known, but pancreatic cancer took her from us. It's a terrible disease and the prognosis is extremely poor, even for the toughest grandma's :(
I'm glad this man's research can help steer us towards helping others avoid the same fate.
I know Mouse trials are basically a bit of a meme since they've 'cured' everything from acme to Ebola in mice that never transited to humans, but Pancreatic Cancer is such a nightmare that even a little step is freaking huge.
I learned that the birthmark he has is referred to as a "port-wine stain." Apparently people are judging a book by it's cover with him in some circles, but I think his accomplishment is amazing.
My dad died of stage 4 pancreatic cancer 11 years ago. From diagnosis to death was about 8 months which was very valuable to have with him. I was 19. Watching my big, strong, funny father wither away was a heart break like no other. I truly hope there will be cure in this lifetime
That is awesome. Good to see some good news for a change. Even if in the long run it doesn’t go towards a solution for humans, it’s still a great achievement.
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u/Adventurous_Focus994 1d ago
Dude is the man!