Your Body Killed Cancer 5 Minutes Ago
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a clear, accessible introduction to cancer and the immune system.
What it is
A Kurzgesagt animation about how the immune system constantly detects and kills cells that are turning cancerous. It explains what cancer cells are and why stopping them is so hard.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends mabbo · 2023-06 · on “Radiation-hardened Quine: A quine that works after any one character is deleted”
There's a great video recently by Kurzgesagt video recently[0] on just how hard the immune system works to identify and kill any cell that is not cooperating anymore. In a nutshell, the DNA fails at protecting from changes all the time, and the immune system is constantly checking for that and killing off those cells. [0] [this video]
Recommends borbulon · 2023-07 · on “Cancer’s origin story features predictable plot line”
I found Kurzgesagt has a very good ELI5 on how cancer grows in the body: [this video] I have lung cancer, stage 4. My cancer has a mutation that is uncommon in lung cancers (< 2%), but common in breast cancers (> 25%). All of the treatments for my mutation are breast cancer treatments. It has been alternately not too bad and hellish getting insurance to agree to give me medications that could be saving my life. That plus a previous steroid-treated pneumonitis disqualifies me from about 90% of clinical trials, so the tip-of-the-spear treatments (CRISPR-T, CRISPR-NK) are unavailable to me. So yes, lots of advancements are being made...in common cancers. Uncommon cancers, we have to wait and take th
Recommends gnyman · 2024-05 · on “mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours”
Not a book, but the Kurzgesagt series on cancer are a great start. [this video] and [LINK] Also while not about cancer specifically, the book Immune by the kurzgesagt founder Philipp Dettmer has a chapter on it and the relation to the immune system. Which is very relevant for these new immunotherapies.