I'm very late to this party but maybe I can help answer your question. Cancer often has a very intricate dance with your immune system. This is because in the normal, healthy body, your immune ...
Do you feel pharmaceuticals have an financial invested interest in prolonging a cure ?
> The system exists to develop trust. and /r wallstreetbets is a sensible place for stock advice
Great question. Would also love to know this.
Perhaps the hope in personalized medicine will only come to fruition when we have a large enough genetic/genomic and clinical dataset to apply sophisticated machine learning techniques. With our ...
Then how do you explain people curing cancer with marijuana and no chemo?
The future of cancer treatment is to stop creating cancer in the body in the first place. There's a book called The Blue Zones that addresses this topic. Prevention is the best cure.
What do you think about companies like Medidata , that seem to form the backbone of clinical trial research? How will they, CROs, etc need to evolve with this kind of open-sourcing? Or, at l...
A little bit of targeting is better than none.
Hi! Thank you for all of your work and research in this field! My mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma two months ago, and it's both advanced and aggressive. I've been told that in the last ye...
My dad is going to die of skin cancer, do you know of any research programs that might take him on and give him a chance of living a longer life?
That's not a particularly accurate description of cancer. What you've basically described is a portion of a textbook case study of how cancer might develop, not an accurate overview of how cancer...
This is probably a question for the askscience subreddit. But is it true that whether humans ever reach living to 150 or 200 that more than likely the body will eventually succomb to some form of...
What do you think about circulating tumor DNA as an analyte? Is it part of the future of cancer care?
Dr. what do you think about the impact that a drug like Neuvax could have on way immunotherapy and the path it take as it evolves?
As someone getting started with computational cancer research, I've been rather disappointed by the TCGA both as a quality data source and for its seemingly paltry translational impact. Are there...
This was exactly what I'm looking for! Thank you!!
Methylation of promoter regions (+/-1kb of the transcription start site) is correlated with gene silencing pretty strongly. There are a couple of papers (in cancer specifically, check out Ben ...
You don't HAVE to at all. It's just that if everyone else is verified then when people who are unverified start claiming facts people are sceptic. I wasn't trying to push someone " who obviousl...
I just watched a 3-part series on cancer with my mom, who has breast cancer and just had a bilateral mastectomy. In it, they talked about cancer research and early 'cures', and one that they desc...
I'm confused, I read the rules for comments and I don't see one that requires verification in order to answer questions. The rules seem to imply that if the information is scientific and supporte...
There is a tool that lets you contribute by reading and tagging research articles. https://mark2cure.org/ Great place to put volunteer efforts.
CpG sites are mostly found around consitutively expressed genes (housekeeping, normal cellular activity, etc...). Methylation of these genes would repress expression of the target genes. So in th...
While open access seems to be catching on with research community, in the practice of medicine, there was a move recently that many patient advocates think is entirely wrong direction. http://e-p...
This is an excellent question. I hope it gets answered - I would love to hear thoughts on this. The idea of open sourcing is great, but I don't see it being widely accepted in the near future.
How is the open publication of participant data consistent with current norms regarding participant privacy and IRB assessment?
Interesting question. First, explore citizen science projects, which offer great opportunities for the average person to make major and meaningful contributions to scientific research (http://en....
I think Open Access journals have seen tremendous success in recent years, building off the massive success of the PLOS journals, which are highly regarded within the scientific community. Becaus...
I agree with your general concern. Clear communication of the strengths and limitations of scientific results and analyses with the media and the lay public is extremely important (for both Big D...
Why does it need to die a painful death?
The problem for me is that a lot of the targeted nanoparticle papers seem to use some ubiquitous receptor like the EGFR, which is still going to have a ton of off-target binding to a high variety...
If I were king of oncology, I would like to have open access to radiologic, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and microscopic image data from patients from a large set of completed randomized c...
You’re right, this is a really important question, and definitely one of the biggest challenges in cancer medicine today is how do we translate recent major advances in genomics, biotechnology ...
Not exactly what you asked but there have been attempts to redefine what a cpg island is by computational methods. These are similar to the methods used to get predicted genes. One example is t...
Does folding, and other crowd computing activities actually help researchers like you in any way at all?
I think there is too much obsession with sequencing... so much data, not enough efforts to sort through what it means. Just throwing more at the wall, not worrying about what sticks
Cool question – I do think this approach could be applied to cancer, and this is an area that my lab is very interested in (esp. as applied to improved diagnostics). Cancer Research UK is also ...
Interesting question. I think there is a lot of value in actually showing the utility of open data, by using it creatively to answer important research questions. There are now huge public databa...
This is a great discussion. The field is incredibly diverse, ranging from chemists actually working with bright liquids, to scientists doing experiments on cells and animals, to clinical scientis...
Obviously I'm not Dr. Beck, but were I to speculate I would say that it will be integral to every diagnosis. In some aspects, it is already very relevant. In the future as genome analysis becomes...
What do you feel is the most significant political/legal/social hinderance to your cancer research?
Dr. Beck - I've been more interested in the "big data" aspect of medicine and discovery. I think data can be a powerful tool, especially with today's information technology. Right now, we're coll...
This is a great discussion. Cancer is an incredibly heterogeneous disease, and there will not be one “cure” for cancer but a variety of different effective therapies for specific cancer types...
I do work on protein folding to some extent so I may be able to give some insight on this question. The inherent problem in what you ask is the connection between protein structure -> cancer/canc...
Hi Dr. Beck, As a cancer patient (oligodendroglioma), is there anything i can do to donate my data to an open access data set? Is there currently an open access project underway to gather data/...
1) Is open access to the data sufficient to advance research in the way you want or do the publications also need to be open access? And the software? 2) Where should the burden lie on hosting ...
Your institution should have these resources available to you. Hospitals/Universities/Pharma all have their own policies but these privacy policies and ethics stuff gets so complicated they usual...
What is your opinion on stem cell research?
The most effective methods for incentivizing collaboration and open data-sources are to make it competitively advantageous for scientists to share data, by making open data a requirement for obta...
Not Dr. Beck but what you are looking for is rare and very common at the same time. Most labs are experts in something: the project that they do. As an expert you tend to use the same techniq...
Hello Dr.Beck, It's always good to know people are spending their time & intellect fighting diseases rather than trading on the stock market. What is your opinion on the Metabolic Theory of C...
I think something like this is definitely needed with the emphasis on molecular markers as guidance for treatment in cancer! How would you address the upcoming HHS changes that as I understand it...
Citing one paper from 8 years ago (actually not even the paper) without any evidence that it has been followed up on or confirmed in any way is weak indeed. You can find a paper in the literature...
Hey Dr. Beck, I'd like to take advantage of your AM(anything) to pick your brain. I have been applying to Research Assistant I jobs and have been looking for a laboratory where I can learn as...
You may also be doing alot of mouse work!
Please don't stop answering questions! I probably disagree with most of the stuff I've seen you post but you definitely discuss things without shutting down conversation altogether. The threads I...
Hi Dr. Beck, While it is definitely conceivable that the advances in machine learning will be able to move research ahead, High quality image data can be anonymized as per HIPAA guidelines, how...
What do you think about the difficulties with translating new treatment ideas to the clinic? ie, its becoming easier to get patient samples from the doctors, but still very difficult to get docto...
You could make a second account that you just use for science stuff and get that one verified. That's what I did (not this account, this is my main account).
Somebody has to pay for an article to be published. Under the conventional peer-reviewed journal system, it's the individual or institution that subscribes to the journal. Under the open access...
Dr. Beck, I'm looking to eventually go to medical school but I need to finish up my pre-reqs in order to apply. I've been working as a temp for Harvard for about 6 months now and my off time is s...
Hi Dr. Beck, Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions. What do you say to scientists and researchers who look down on publishing in open-access journals like PLOS? In the last lab I ...
Hi Dr. Beck, Thanks so much for doing this. There is certainly a push to collect big data, but how to best get information out of these sets is a big question. I'm not sure there have been as man...
Besides what you call "large, high-quality data sets" what do you think of the crowdsourced data that is being gathered through #healthkit and other phone apps that encourage patients to submit d...
What advice would you give to a 2nd year medical student interested in a pathology residency if, say, he/she did not have much of any prior pathology experience?
As a fellow phd candidate, I would love to know the answer to this. open source is so common among those who develop programs for research, but it seems like data access is less accepted even for...
I'm just saying with the level of quality of the comments and how strict it is for us to delete posts that don't meet those requirements... I've found it to be a lot higher standards than /r/tree...
How would the access to patient data work? Would it be proprietary where researchers can only access data on specific diseases they are studying or would it be entirely open for the scientific co...
Not just adverse effects either. Well-designed clinical trials are essential for finding out if the proposed treatments even have a positive effect on outcomes compared to existing treatments and...
So are you for or against what Aaron Schwartz tried to accomplish before his suicide by making all pay to read academic journals and data public? Do you think not having this information public...
Hello Dr. Beck! First, thank you for being here and taking the time to speak with us! My questions stem from the patient point of view. What exactly can cancer patients do to get their inform...
Donate directly to the National Cancer Institute or look into donating directly to local hospitals! That's the best way to make sure all of your donation goes towards research funding and improvi...
We do actually know a lot about how cancer cells become migratory (if you go onto Google scholar and search for 'basement membrane invasion' or 'epithelial mesenchymal transition' you'll get thou...
Hi Dr. Beck, What are your thoughts on using platforms such as Cancerlinq to aggregate data on patients treated with cancer? Specifically, do you think the quality of such data will provide mea...
For those conducting clinical research, what guidance and resources are available describing best practices for data sharing? For example, how to structure, document, anonymise (if necessary), an...
It's a common mistake to assume that the words "treatment" and "cure" are mutually exclusive. There most certainly financial incentives for developing treatments with the goal of a cure.
/r/science has many many people verified here. It's been a default sub since the beginning. If there's anywhere to trust with your information on reddit it's here. You don't want to let one ba...
What is your opinion on building a culture of open prepublication (ArXiv, bioRXiv, and academic blogs) in oncology, especially mathematical oncology? Are there extra concerns in terms of open (pr...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070417193338.htm what do you make of this then.
Dr Beck, First off thank you for doing this AMA! I was recently informed about Duke's phase I study utilizing PVS-RIPO (genetically engineered Poliovirus) against recurrent GBM. I know it is ...
How do you expect this to catch on when there is no money involved in curing disease (only treating it)?
I don't know how to organize file systems or really my own head for that matter, do you know of any resources I can use to rearrange all the information I have up here into knowledge?
So things like TCGA has lots of data already like this. What would be the advantage of even more sequencing? Wouldn't it seem like it would be more useful just to biopsy and sequence the patients...
The risk with targeted therapies is always that you'll go too specific. Tumors are very heterogenous: you'll often find different populations of cancer cells expressing different mutations (and e...
Obviously not Dr. Beck, but my two cents: Scandals of this sort have hit every kind of journal. It is devilishly hard to pick up outright data fabrication. Post publication discussion is crucial,...
Hi, I'm not Dr Beck, but I can offer some answers that hopefully Dr Beck will answer in greater detail later. Immunotherapy is a very large and promising subset of cancer research, and it is in...
How close are we to a cure for most cancers?
Interested in what Dr. Beck has to say but cancer immunotherapies appear to be the future. Currently, they are tested together with chemotherapy but it's arguably much more promising than outcome...
Because the highly trained and cautious doctors, researchers, and administrators who run the FDA know far, far more about the potential adverse effects of treatments than the average lay person
Firstly congratulations on the truly incredible progress in the oncology field over the past 4 or so years - a lot of work done over the past 30 years seems to be really starting to pay off in th...
At my institution, the administrative and legal staffs are very hesitant to allow open access publishing of data, because the institution often loses exclusive intellectual property rights to any...
Hey Dr. Beck thanks for doing an AMA I have one question: What role will genetic testing play in the future of cancer treatment?
Hi Prof. Beck. Thanks for doing this. One of the biggest problems with modern medical science is the fact that the majority of clinical research for developing new therapies is performed by for-p...
Hi Dr. Beck, Thank you for taking the time to do this AMA. There is a quote that I like, when it comes to framing discussions about cancer genomics: > The greatest obstacle to discover...
Thanks for doing this AMA! I have a question about open access publishing. I think the main problem with getting people to switch to publishing in open access journals is the impact factor. I'm a...
I'm working on developing molecular imaging agents for identifying cancer cells that show extremely high levels of cell death-avoidance mechanisms like autophagy for my thesis. My average day i...
Having all data sets open is great, but it's a moot point if we don't have industry standards for how the data should be structured. Even though research grants require that data be submitted to ...
I'm sure there are overwhelmingly professional people in both subreddits, but when it comes to a site that flourishes on anonymity, I've taken more to the motto of: "Fool me once, shame on you;...
Hi Dr Beck, Somepeople say that in the coming decade the primary treatment for cancer will be Biologics and Immunotherapy, whereas other think that these treatments are a long, long way from be...
Probably a bad idea to use a replication-competent virus during treatment, as this can lead to unintended toxicity and a strong immune response. In addition, the prolonged inflamation could be de...
Hi Dr. Beck! Thanks for stopping by to answer some of our questions. What do you think is the current biggest obstacle in treating cancers? Is it the science, or the delivery to patients?
I've gotten verified on this subreddit and haven't been stalked. This subreddit is a bit more professional that /r/trees .
What is your take on Optum Labs?
Exactly. All nanotechnology does is enable a dynamic and targeted release of drugs on cancer cells. This allows very extreme specificity in selection of where and when to release the drugs but at...
If finance, ethics, resources and time were not an issue, which approach do you believe will find the best cure for cancer?
Hi Dr Beck! This is a really fascinating initiative. The big question that comes to my mind though is this -- how can we best translate these data into clinical outcomes? Prognostic biomark...
Do you believe that a hypothetical access to 100% of the world's cancer patients would actually enable us to solve the problem of personalized cancer genomics, or would even that not be sufficien...
Hi Dr Beck! I was hoping you would be able to talk briefly about your thoughts on Dr Carl June's breakthroughs and if you feel his research and methods could possibly cure all types of cancers, a...
I don't believe the viruses actually infect the tumors. It's all about stimulating the immune system and overwhelming the local immunosuppressive influence that cancer spits out. We've been d...
Do you ever feel we will get to the stage of cancer as being intimidating as the common flu, in other works easy and simple to treat with almost no chance of death?
That... pretty much answers my question. Will update the film in my head, thanks!
Do you think open access journals encourage bad science and bad science reporting?
I've been verified, but not on this subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/2gerpu/microbiologist_here_would_you_be_interested_in/ckj0kwj And I actually did a couple of article discu...
One major drawback in open source journals so far has been editorial/reviewer quality. A paper in PLOS One has recently been found to be completely fabricated and while this is always a concern ...
My concern with big data analysis is the methods of statistical analysis used as well as the difference in opinion on interpretation of results. This often leads to misunderstanding or confusion,...
Dear Dr. Beck, I'm a high school senior who will be attending Boston University this coming fall. Would it possible for a freshman to work at your lab? May I apply or email you to set up an inter...
Cool. Is there a way to prove your legitimacy so I can show this to a family member undergoing chemo that would really be helped by medical marijuana?
Thanks so much for doing this and thanks for supporting open access journals. I think they are fantastic. My question is a bit of futurology. Is the journal format likely to be the future of publ...
Please consider verifying your credentials and getting a flair assigned to your username, especially seeing as you're answering questions with claims of expertise. Details on our flairs and instr...
I too would like to know about the ramifications of the explosion of computational methods, though I just want to clarify one point. While these methods may seem to be progressing and converging ...
I'm not a cancer researcher, but I do biomedical research and have plenty of friends that do cancer research. It's incredibly multifaceted, on the ground. A PI (primary investigator) like Dr. B...
I know the heterogeneity of cancer makes this an incredibly difficult task, but we've got to figure out what mobilizes circulating tumor cells. Prevention of metastasis could save more lives than...
Hi Dr. Beck, I am currently a PhD candidate in pharmacology studying the anti-breast cancer effects of a group of compounds called jadomycins. I believe that open-access journals are fantastic,...
Is there any open source information on the outcome statistics of various chemo protocols per diagnosis/treatment intent?
Couldn't agree with you more. If there is ever a truly medical reason to legalize cannabis, it would be to aid the suffering of cancer and PTSD patients.
Quality of life is a very scarce resource for a chemo patient. MJ is one of the best ways to help achieve this.
I start path residency in the fall. Any tips for getting involved with molecular research? Any tips for being an intern?
At least at my institution, there is a discount on any -omics studies if you publish the dataset for open access. Do you think monetary incentives are the way to go? Would it be feasible/ethical ...
Yeah as far as I can remember there was a publication that plastics interact with something essential to methyltransferase functionality or synthesis. Methyltransferases are proteins that methyla...
Essentially yes. Some of the typical side effects of chemo include pain, hunger and nausea. THC has a well known metabolic signaling pathway that makes you feel hungry with the "munchies." CB...
I am asking about the potential role of human envoronmental toxins such as polystyrene in the cause of loss of gene regulation.
So when people use medical marijuana for things like cancer, it's more for treating the symptoms of chemo than anything else?
You asked about the cause of cancer. Cancer is caused by a loss of gene regulation for oncogenes.
How does a technology like Watson, IBM's knowledgemachine, feature into the research you're doing? Is that useful at all for what you want to do?
Cannabis, specifically THC and CBD are far to weak therapeutics to treat cancer in any way. While CBD can help in macrophage-related cancers, you're only going to die if you depend on it as a can...
Dr. Beck. I feel like the weakness of any large scale retrospective analysis is how well you can standardize the clinical and laboratory output. Drs. order different lab tests, use different scor...
Thank you for defining cancer for me but that doesn't address my question.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions! My roommate in college in 2005 bet me that in 10 years nanotechnology would cure cancer. Can you definitively state that cancer has not been cure...
The causes of cancer at a cellular level is because of altercation in gene regulation. Specifically some genes produce growth factor proteins which aid in cellular growth and division. Because th...
So in your experience and opinion, do you think that private hospitals, labs and universities all over the world are willing to share freely all of their own studies and researches in the matter,...
Hi Dr Beck! I am a phd candidate in the Boston area who is also passionate about open access. When I talk to other students about open access, they couldn't care less. What should I be doing to h...
Viruses have a big advantage over the traditional antibody response because viruses will use the cancer cells growth machinery as their own in order to propagate and spread. So instead of havin...
Hi Dr. Beck, What do you think about Foldit ? Gamers collaborating / working to solve problems in medicine -- do you think this could be applied to cancer for say, some sort of general treatme...
What would you say have been the largest challenges getting these different groups to work twords one goal? Hiw do you manage to bridge language barriers? Your research seems to span countries an...
Hi Dr. Beck, this may not be your specific area of expertise but have you and your team gleaned any insight into the causes of cancer? Anthropogenic environmental toxins such as polystyrene are a...
Rather than "walking for awareness" as many people do, how are some ways the average person can support this kind of quality research?
In my head, the idea of scientists searching for a cure for cancer evokes stock reel footage of labcoated men and women carefully observing Erlenmeyer flasks full of bright liquids. Could you dis...
Ok, so just going to get this out of the way, and this is a 100% serious question: Do you think Marijuana has significant impacts or the potential to have a significant impact on cancer treatme...
Outside of increased data access, what do you believe could/will be the next big break in cancer treatment?
Hi Dr. Beck, I have 3 questions for you: 1. How do you think we can incentivize collaboration and open data sources in a field as competitive as medical research? 2. How have new advancements i...
It seems that nanotechnology, computational methods, and molecular tech are all converging on a cure but, even though there has been a lot of progress, traditional chemo is still the preferred tr...
Science AMAs are posted early to give readers a chance to ask questions vote on the questions of others before the AMA starts. Dr. Beck is a guest of /r/science and have volunteered to answer ...
Hi Reddit! My name is Dr. Andy Beck, and I am an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and the director of becklab, a molecular epidemiology research lab a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/33gq1g/plos_science_wednesday_im_dr_andy_beck_open/