StarTalk Radio - Curing Cancer, with 2018 Nobel Laureate Jim Allison

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on cancer research with freshly-minted 2018 Nobel laureate and immunologist Dr. Jim Allison, who’s at the frontier of finding new cancer immunotherapy treatments. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/curing-cancer-with-2018-nobel-laureate-jim-allison/Photo Credit: BruceBlaus [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I've got with me co-host Chuck Nice. Hey, Neil. Always good to have you, Chuck. Always good to be here. Oh, wait, tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. Thank you, sir. Yes, I am.

All right. He never says my Twitter handle. I gotta say his Twitter. He never says, that's fine, fine. I'm just saying, I don't think you have to say it when the person has like 100 million people on Twitter. You know, we have 12 million Twitter followers. It's 13 million, but that's fine. No worries. This is a special edition. I think of it as a special edition of Cosmic Queries. It's a special edition because we have with us someone who is not only the world's expert on this topic,

he might be the greatest expert in the universe on this topic. And it's the topic of curing cancer. Wow. Yes, yes. It's a big topic. It's a big topic. It's on everyone's mind. And our special guest to help answer these questions on curing cancer, because obviously

I have no such expertise, is immunologist Dr. Jim Allison. Jim, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you very much. Yeah. So you're Skyping into us from where? From my office at the Cancer Center in Houston. The Cancer Center in Houston? Huge medical complex there, if memory serves.

And you were just minutes ago awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. You're professor and chair at the Department of Immunology at the University of Texas at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Did I get all those titles correct? Yeah, that's correct. All right, excellent. Very cool. So did they call you in the middle of the night and said you won the Nobel Prize

and then you hung up because you thought it was a prank call? Because that's how it happened for me. No, actually, there's been some buzz the last couple of years and you know, and my wife says, well, phone, you know, we wake up, look at the clock, say, well, the phone didn't ring,

so that's next year. I go, okay. This year, I got up and she said, the phone, I guess, next year, you know, phone didn't ring, I guess we'll get it next year okay this year i got up and uh she said the phone i guess next year you know phone didn't ring i guess we'll get it next year then the phone rang at that instant it was my son though i just saw on tv did you want the nobel prize and and i said really what you know and then i looked at my phone buzzed and there was a call from Sweden on it, basically. So my son beat him. You found out, like, through the news, basically.

Not from the actual Nobel Committee, but through the news. I don't know what it was. They didn't have my right phone number or something. I don't know. But, yeah. See, I've never gotten a Nobel Prize because my phone number is unlisted. You better fix that. So again, thanks for, I know you must be swamped with media inquiries and the like,

so I'm delighted that you gave this program this hour of your time. So thanks for that. this program, this hour of your time. So thanks for that. So if you could just lead off by telling us what is it that you were recognized for doing? I was recognized for developing a way to get the immune system to attack cancer cells, which is something that people have been doing for a long time.

And it's potentially curative in many kinds of cancer. So instead of attacking the tumor, which would be the natural first thought, because, oh, that's bad, let's get rid of it, let's attack it, you came in the back door. Yeah. What I did was for about three decades I've been involved in trying to understand how these cells called T cells, they're kind of the warriors of the immune system.

They go all over your body looking for a virus infected cell or a tumor or something and then they deal with it. They say, usually by killing it. But anyway, we know they can attack, we know they can recognize tumor cells, but getting them to do it effectively wasn't easy. A lot of trials failed to try to arm them to go attack the cancer or get them to attack it but I found a molecule it's called CTLA4 it doesn't matter what it stands for but it's a molecule that's sort of the brakes on the immune system

after T cells get going they use this as a negative regulator to turn themselves off so they don't hurt you by just continuing to divide, divide, divide, fill you all up with a particular kind of T cell. And so I had the idea that maybe normally that molecule, the breaks were coming on too early and stopping the T cells from eliminating the cancer. So I thought, well, let's just disable the brakes temporarily. And sure enough, it works. But just for the reason you said, a lot of people have real trouble with it.

Because they said, how can you treat cancer by ignoring the cancer? You're not even treating the cancer. You're treating the immune system. I love the way you started your answer. You said, I found a molecule. Right. That happens to you all the time, Chuck. Yes, exactly.

It's a little smaller than what you look at. So when we see these commercials on television that say, this is not a video game and this is not a screensaver, this is an actual cancer cell being attacked by your own immune system. Is that your research that they're referring to? Yes. Wow. That is really impressive. Now you're only impressed because it was in a commercial?

Yeah, because anybody can win a Nobel Prize. Anybody can win a Nobel Prize. But not everybody can get a commercial on TV. That's true. I'm interested because But not everybody can get a commercial on TV. That's true. I'm interested because I'm familiar with your work because my mother was lost to cancer last year, about a week ago last year.

I lost my mom to cancer. Bone cancer. But the immunotherapy was a little too, she was too advanced and too old, they said. So what are the cancers where your discoveries

are most effective? Well, up to now, the most effective would have been melanoma, about 20 metastatic melanoma, which when we started working on this, there was no approved treatment. And there had been no drug that had ever improved survival in a randomized trial, by what I mean is there was no successful treatment.

And so that was where the trials with my drug started. Well, they started in mice, one of the things that was lucky. It worked against all kinds of cancer. But it started in melanoma. And what we know now, and it was approved by the FDA in 2011 after a lot of trials. But what we know now, actually, about two years ago, there was enough data to have 10 years follow-up data on 5,000 people who had been treated. And 20-something percent, a little over 20 percent are alive 10 years after a single round of treatment. And so when you add a second drug to it, a drug that was subsequently discovered by Honjo and his group who shares the project, that response rate goes up to 60%

hmm but so that's the highest and there's no reason to think that those patients won't be around for 10 years as well we have to wait and see we don't know yet but you know I'm hopeful but it also has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for lung cancer kidney cancer bladder cancer Hodgkin's lymphoma Merkel cell cancer head and bladder cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer, a few others. There's 15 indications it's been approved for, and with varying response rates from 15% to 50%.

And so it's all in place. And that means that the fact they're approved means any doctor, of course, could prescribe them. I just heard you say head and neck cancer, which I've never heard of until this moment. And that's not brain and throat. That's actually head and neck. No, it's from either smoking or human papillomavirus. Ah.

People that chew tobacco or smoke cigars get that a lot. Okay. Okay. Okay. So another quick question just before we go to our fan base, because they're the ones that supplied the foundation of questions that is going to make this show. Procedurally, if you can demonstrate that something you're working on cures cancer in mice or rats, do you have to have human trials for it to still be approved by the FDA? Yeah, absolutely.

When I started on this, a lot of people said to me, well, anybody can cure cancer in mice. Oh, wow. That's funny. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. That's true. By the way, doctor, just so that you know, doctor, we call those haters.

Oh, those people need a little education. But, yeah, you have to have the trials to prove it's safe and, you know, do efficacy. Yeah, but it's something that was revealed in, what's that movie, Dallas Buyers Club. In the Dallas Buyers Club, the FDA was like the enemy, and then in the end they said the FDA loosened some rules to get a drug into use even before trials are fully completed. Because if I'm about to die, to say, oh, this drug might not be safe for you,

but it could cure me entirely, the efficacy of that feels wrong. Yeah, it's a complicated subject. My brother had metastatic prostate cancer while we were developing this drug and I really wanted to get it to him but I just couldn't. The reason is that the companies that helped develop it, I couldn't but the reason is that you know the companies that are helped develop we i couldn't develop it by myself i had to team up with a biotech company to actually make the drug itself and then they had to get approved do these trials but you know they could only make

so much and if they try it on people outside of a trial and and hurt them or kill them, then that ruins the drug. So at the risk of slowing it down, they insist on these trials. I think what they've done, though, especially since the issues you're talking about, they've become a lot faster now. So in this class of drugs, they've really greased the rails on it now where there's enough experience where if you show them efficacy, that's good enough. Because they know now about the safety. Yeah.

Excellent. Wow. So, Chuck, let's go to our fan base. Okay. Who do you have? Kyle Ryan Toth from Patreon says this. this, along with our search for curing cancer once it forms, are we researching ways to prevent cancer from even developing? In the first place. Yes.

And that's a great question, by the way. Yeah, we're working on that. Actually, there are some vaccines for HPV-induced cervical cancer cervical cancer for example that just a word of wisdom i think all teenage kids male and female need to get that vaccine before they become sexually active because we can completely transmit that disease now the normal kinds of cancer that we're talking about here you know melanoma and stuff like that it, it's just so hard to predict who's going to respond and, you know, what the targets are. The immune system just attacks unique stuff. In almost every case it's different. There are some hereditary cancers, though, that you might be able

to vaccinate. People are really giving that a lot of serious consideration now that already have some lesions that may predispose them and then we can take care of that so jim is it is it that the um we have one word to describe all of these kinds of cancers so we think of them as one monolithic target to attack but maybe we need different words for them all so that we can think of them as things that would respond to their own unique solutions. Right. I mean, it used to be it was cancer and then when we realized there were, we, I'm speaking

for the whole field, people realized that there's skin cancers, breast cancers, colon cancers. They were named after the tissue that they came from. Then the next step was when people that were studying the cancer biology realized that the mutations that caused them were very different and then they sort of they all were differentiated by what the causative gene mutation was that gave rise to them. If you classify them that way there's several hundred kinds of cancer. Right, there it is. Okay, so that is the

trend line yeah yeah but when we look at them now it's sort of we're broadening it again we just i just look at cancer c to be immunogenic meaning they provoke an immune response so they don't okay right instead of any individual type of cancer and just very quickly before we move on because we're almost out of time for the segment but i you mentioned something in a cursory fashion that i think is very important and i i just caught the the the way you phrased it every teenager might want to look into hpv now is that including men because you know when when you're a guy and you're 18 and you hear cervical cancer you're like i'm good i'm okay i don't have to worry about that.

You may be good, but the women that you encounter may not be good later on because men are asymptomatic. You get it and you pass it, but you never know you had it. And so, you know, men need to get it as well. There you go. So that was my point is that this is something that affects everyone. And the vaccine, we know it leads to the direct prevention of cervical cancer in women because it fights the virus that causes it in women. Correct?

Exactly. The immune system destroys the virus before it could do anything. Fantastic. Wow. Yeah. Okay. All right. We got to take our first break. You're listening to a special Cosmic Queries edition where we are privileged and honored to have the freshly minted Nobel Laureate.

Wow. That sounds so cool, man. Freshly minted Nobel Laureate, man. Freshly minted. Right. They just made you, doctor. Let me take a stamp. Take a stamp. Stamp him.

Dr. Jim Allison from University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, Blue Beach. We're back. Star Talk. We have with us Dr. Jim Allison. Freshly minted Nobel laureate. Sweet. Dr. Jim Allison Freshly minted Nobel laureate Sweet And he took time Out of what we know Is an over subscribed

Day of his To just share with us His insights Absolutely On what cancer is And how it works And how we're trying To fight it

And it's Cosmic Queries So keep it going Here's the next question This is from a friend Hey doc What are you going to do with all that money? First, you realize he's got to split that three ways. You realize this. Oh, what?

That's not right. So whatever the total money is, he gets a fraction of it. Okay. Let's start there. All right. Okay, Jim, what are you going to do with the money? There's just one other. It's just two ways.

Oh, just two ways? Yes. Two ways. Okay. Well, the government. The government's the third one, I guess. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that they tax you on your Nobel Prize? Absolutely. That's disgraceful, sir.

Disgraceful. Okay. So he gets half the prize, and then the government gets like the other half. The other half. Half of it. Half. Okay. So, all right. What are you going to do like the other half. The other half. Okay.

So what are you going to do with the $40.89 that you have left? I'm going to probably give a lot of it to some cancer research organizations. And I think I need a new suit. We'll let you do that, sir. I wasn't even serious about the car. I was jerking around. This was great to actually learn all of this stuff about the Nobel Prize. Yeah. All right.

Let's go to a real question. As a matter of fact, this should have been the first question before our Patreon. And this is from Niren Reich on Instagram, who says, what is cancer? I mean, you know, a lot of people may not know exactly what cancer is. Well, I'm not sure we still know exactly what cancer is, but a lot of people have referred to it as sort of a social disease, you know, complex organisms with lots of different kinds of cells, and they've got to play nicely with each other, you know,

to grow organs to a certain size and then stop and then be able to heal wounds but then stop when the time stands where they're put and not go someplace else and so cancer is just sort of one description is hyperplasia meaning starts growing too fast and doesn't stop but that's basically it's just cells losing the normal controls that make them cooperate with all the other cells to make you what you are. And these are your cells. They're not some exterior alien, not alien in a cosmic sense, but just foreign. It's not just some foreign thing in your body that you could just remove and all is well. Your body is misbehaving.

Is that a fair way to characterize it? Yeah, the cells in your body, some of the cells in your body are misbehaving and causing damage to the cells around them. In some cases, just by getting too big. But in other cases, by are invading and destroying tissues. Cool. All right. Let's move on to Renee Douglas from Pittsburgh, and she wants to know this.

If a cure is found, would it cure all cancers, or are there different types of cancers, and would each one need a different cure? And just as a follow-up, is there a means of achieving a universal cure is probably an easier way to put it. Yeah, excellent question. It used to be that there were what were called personalized therapies for each patient. And you try to figure out where the mutation was that was causing the cell to be a cancer cell. try to figure out where the mutation was that was causing the cell to be a cancer cell. Those turned out not to be so good at curing cancer because there are so many mutations in a lot of cancer cells that there is not just one. You kill all the cells, you've got one mutation and there's one with others. The drug doesn't work anymore, you have to

keep changing it. One of the beauties of letting the immune system go and unleashing it to the T cells to attack tumors is they can recognize many, many of the mutations. So they become a multi, bigger army that could hit a lot more targets. And since it's not directed against any specific thing, one of the ideas when I thought of this in the mid 90s I thought well this could be a way of treating all cancers and you know that has not been realized you know there are limitations that have to do with just a number of mutations and other properties of individual cancers. I mean some like lung cancer, melanoma, bladder, kidney, these can be cured. In a fraction of patients, these can be cured now.

We know from melanoma, where there's the most experience, that over 20% of people are alive 10 years after a single treatment. That's maybe going up to about 60%. Other ones like glioblastoma, which is what, you know, Senator McCain died of, we just haven't made much progress there. And we're, you know, we're working. My wife, Dr. Padmati Sharma, who's a physician and physician scientist, I'm a scientist, but we're working together in a group called

the Immunotherapy Platform here at MD Anderson our whole goal is to get cancer cells just from patients get the tumors and see what's going on in there you know what kind of T cells are there what kind of immune cells are in there and what's going on and individual kinds of cancers that we could figure out how to make combinations that will treat you many cancers as we can. So I think we're going to eliminate a large fraction of many kinds of cancers, but I don't think I could see a world where there is no cancer. So you just created a cancer bank.

Did I characterize that correctly? Basically, yes. We store specimens, but we also study the fresh out of the patients as well. That's cool. That is one bank I never want to bank with. The cancer bank, I'm just saying. I'm happy with my money at Chase. We'll take things out of that bank and hopefully do some good with them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. What else do you have? Let's go to Ari Mody, who says this. Could cancer be cured through any of the breakthroughs achieved from CRISPR, the gene editing? And I'll just follow that up with her. Was that instrumental in any way in your research, CRISPR and gene editing? No, it wasn't.

Okay, that's the answer. No. Next question. And there you go, Ari. As far as it's promised, a lot of people are thinking about it. The problem is if you can get rid of those genes that are causing the cancer using CRISPR and turn them back to normal, the problem is it's kind of hard to figure out how to do that because you'd have to do, there are many of them, but you'd have to do them all

one at a time. But if you can figure out a way to, because you'd have to do there are many of them, you'd have to do them all one at a time. But if you can figure out a way to, and people are working on this to change a whole bunch of genes at once, that might work. So there's a lot of it's not here yet, but I wouldn't rule it out. So you're not ruling out

the notion that it could be you have to snip out a piece of gene that would be causing cancer whether or not CRISPR is the actual means by which that would happen. Right. Right. Okay. Cool.

That's excellent. Excellent. Good stuff. David Bailey from Facebook wants to know this. There are a lot of claims out there about different superfoods and how they're able to, he says cure, but that's the claims that are made are not that they cure cancer. However, example, turmeric. But are there any scientifically validated foods or diets that can help a person who is battling cancer to aid their immune system in the fight?

Thank you, David Bailey. What a polite question, David. So it's a food question. Food question. Yeah, I think people ask me that all the time, and I really can't give you any single answer except to say, do the things your mama told you when you were a kid. Eat a well-rounded diet.

Don't smoke. Don't lay out in the sun. Don't drink too much. Do everything in moderation. Exercise and all that stuff. Just stay healthy as you can. Oh, good. You had a good mom my mom used to tell me you're gonna die and uh you know stay in the house it's crazy out there you're gonna die

so so i i think uh jim just said that i can stop eating kale that's what he said i think i heard him say that just a little bit of it. Right, in moderation. In moderation. You just need a little bit of kale. Remember when kale was a garnish? What happened to our society? All right, here we go.

Yeah, I can't stand kale. All right, here we go. Jeff Ferris from Facebook wants to know this. It's estimated about one-third of the people who get cancer are genetically predisposed to it. Where are we on the ability to do testing to predict the outcome? And how reliable is the current state of testing? Is having a genetic marker of 50% positive or 70% positive a good means of being able to tell? Yeah, I'm not sure it's as high as 30%, a significant number are,

but breast cancers, for example, to some extent ovarian cancer in women can be caused by BRCA mutations. And by the way, doctor, just for all of those who are unlike me that know exactly what BRCA mutations are what are what are what are those mutations that were first found uh to to that just by studying backwards that women with breast cancer had very often had this gene i don't even remember what it stands for but anyway this gene called brca breast cancer uh i guess the brc says for breast cancer, but we know now that it's involved in DNA, keeping your genes normal.

It's inherited. If a woman inherits one copy from her mom and something happens to the other copy, then it could be dangerous. There's something with that, breast cancer. There's a lot of other kinds of cancer that it's not quite as definitive as that. Prostate cancer, we know that if you have a brother that got it, you're about twice as likely to get it, but nobody's been able to put their finger on why that is yet. I mean, on what part of the genetic of your genome is then responsible. So with the BRCA, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the first time you have such

high level confidence that a person will get cancer that people are convinced to have preventative surgery? That's happening, yes. Right, right. But there's no other cancer prediction for which that is advised, is that correct? Not that I'm aware of yeah okay uh this is denise cunningham troya and she says my five-year-old daughter or granddaughter was diagnosed in may with acute uh lymphoblastic leukemia uh p uh since it is generated in the marrow, is there anything new on the horizon? So are you familiar with this particular cancer and any research that might be encouraging? I'm certainly not an expert on that kind of disease, but I can tell you that there is some activity in seeing if these checkpoint blockers, as we call them, work in leukemias in adults.

And they do in some cases. The work's early. It only started a few years ago. But there's some hesitation in using them in developing adolescents or younger kids because people are somewhat worried about immunological changes while your body's changing and everything. But I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there uh sooner or later cool well that's encouraging there you go that's uh very cool and there's another therapy called car t-cell which is an engineered kind of t-cell that's put back into leukemia patients that might also have some promise. I don't think it has been used in kids.

All right. So two things to perhaps look forward to. And, of course, we wish Denise and her granddaughter all the best. This is Cheryl Squeaker-Carter. And she says, Is there actually any scientific research being done on cannabis and the effects it has on cancer Yeah, I think there's quite a bit but most of its

You know is giving to what we call palliative care to make patients more comfortable less nauseous when they're getting chemotherapy I don't think there's any evidence that cannabis You know, it could be used to treat cancer itself. And in fact, it has some of the same carcinogens that tobacco has, but at much, much lower levels. So as far as I know, the only thing it's being used for, like I said, is just helping patients feel better. The carcinogenic components, does that, though they're much smaller, does it matter how you ingest the cannabis and what role it could then play in these cancer bits? Yeah. If you smoke it, it's going to immediately go into your

lungs and then ultimately into the bladder. If it's eaten, a lot of it gets digested away. So I don't think there's any data showing that it has caused cancer. I think all that matters. I doubt if it would if it was just, you know, cookies or something. Right. Okay. Or brownies.

Or brownies. Exactly brownies, exactly. Or any number of edibles, I'm just saying. Very cool. I don't know why, but I feel a need to buy a ticket to Colorado. Chuck, we've got time for one more question in this segment. Okay, here we go. This is Daniel Junius, or Junius, wants to know this. Is it plausible to kill cancer with cryosurgery? Yes.

Yes. Absolutely. And we've done some experiments with that. Just to be clear, cryo is cold. Freezing, yeah. There's a probe. It's done in the clinic a lot, particularly in kidney cancer and breast cancer. It's got to be localized though. We showed in mice

that if you had two tumors on opposite sides of a mouse, you could cure one of them by freezing it, leave the other one alone, but injecting our drug just after you froze the first one because that makes it fall apart and then primes the T cells that will go over and kill the other one. That's now in in clinical trials in kidney cancer and breast cancer. Wow. That sounds like a military operation. We will conquer this side of the enemy. Yes.

We deputize them, and they become our zombie army. That's what it is. We created a zombie army to go kill cancer. Super cool, man. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. All right. So, Jim, we're going to take a quick break,

and we'll be back for our final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We're back for our final segment of Star Talk, Cosmic Queries Edition. I'm with Chuck Nice. That's right. The subject is curing cancer. And we got all up in the face of Dr. Jim Allison. Yes. Yes.

He's here with us here and now. Just won the Nobel Prize in human physiology, one of the categories of the Nobel Prize. And we've been picking his brain about this with our queries. With our queries. So again, Jim, thanks for being on StarTalk. And let's continue. What do you have? All right.

This is Kyle Coombs from Facebook. And Kyle is from Airdrie, Canada and says, Is there a chance if we never find a cure for the many types of cancers that humans will one day, in a Darwinian sense, evolve out of cancer? So a little awkwardly worded, but what he's saying is, can we evolve? If it's killing us. If it's killing us, can we evolve beyond cancer? Kind of like selective breeding, the sense where the small percentage of people who do not develop cancer will be naturally pre-selected

to continue propagating the species interesting question not sure if that's your expertise but well evolution is driven by survival of the fittest so it works on let's put it this way

once you've made your children evolution doesn't give a damn about you so there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure to you know so I think childhood cancers and stuff there may be pressure to get rid of but I really don't think that that there's going to be any selection against people that are old of the typical age to get cancer because there's just no reason that doesn't make you fitter and able to reproduce more i guess society could change enough where that becomes different but biologically i don't think it would have yes if you have babies you know nature's done with you right right you propagated your your

right because that's really what the whole thing is about that's what the whole thing is all about sending your dna into the future right and what the whole thing is about, right? That's what the whole thing is about. It's all about sending your DNA into the future. Right, and what happens to you afterwards, no one gives a rat's ass about. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Boy, nature, what a cruel mistress she is, huh? God. Oh, well, there you go. That was a great question then, and a very disturbing answer. And a very disturbing answer. By the way, so, you know, the Darwin Award is given out annually to the person who does something completely stupid and ends up dying for having done so. Right. Okay, it's called the Darwin Award. But you can only get that award if you've died for doing something stupid and have not yet had kids. Right.

Because then you already sent your stupidity forward. Then you would have. Right. So it's calling the herd as it is given stupidity forward. Then you would have, right. So it's calling the herd as it is, giving out every year. There you go. And you don't want to ever be a winner of it because it means you're dead. True. FYI.

Yes. And stupid. And stupid. And that's no way to go through life, dead and stupid. Stupid. Okay. All right. I'll take one or the other, but not i don't want both okay uh muhammad amir from facebook says naked mole rats sharks and rays have immunity

evolved to efficiently resist cancer how is this? And can we use that to our advantage? I know some time ago there was a great deal of extensive research into broccoli enzymes and shark DNA. Are we still headed down that path, doctor? Well, there's still a lot of studies. I mean, sharks do have an immune system, but it's very simple compared to ours. And it's true that they don't get cancer very often, but I don't think we really understand why that is.

I mean, one reason is because until recently, the ocean was pretty free of carcinogens. Right. Well, we're changing that. Yeah. We're certainly on top of that one. Wait, wait. Allow me to ask a stupid question. How do we know the cause of death of sharks?

That's a good question. I have no idea. Who's doing this? Because it seems to me when you die in the ocean, you are bait and consumed instantly by everybody else within minutes. Right. You can't just be laying up there dead and think that. There are no shark mummies.

That's right. I guess occasionally some wash up on shore or something. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. Well, there you have it. There you go, Muhammad.

Let's move on to Jess Nudalo, who says this. I don't know if this would fall under the topic, but I'd like to go down a different direction and ask if we can take advantage of cancer cells at all. I've heard of the HeLa, or H-E-L-A cells, which may be relevant, but can't say that I'm an expert on the subject. Well, thank you for explaining yourself so incredibly detailed. Is there a way, is there any time where a cancer cell can be beneficial to the host? Can that mutation do something good in any way? Well, no, but cells, we take cancer cells out of patients all the time and use them to study what caused cancer and how they respond to treatments and stuff. So that's what those HeLa cells that he's talking about were used for for years.

And now there's a lot of cell lines like that that are in use for research. Cool. Okay. That's good to know. Good to know. Excellent. Let's go to Vasilios. good to know excellent let's go to uh vasilios econom oh iconomy iconomitis okay he's greek just just going to greek yeah feel the greek just feel i'm gonna feel the greek it would be economides

uh economides economides when you said it was g, the Greek came out of me. Man, look at that. Yeah. Greek suck nice. Go. All right. Have there been any advancements in stem cell research that connect to or better our understanding of cancer research? Stem cells is in all the news all the time. Yeah, that's all the time. A hot topic, too.

All the rage. Politically charged. Yeah. time. A hot topic too. All the rage. Politically charged. Yeah. Again, there's a lot that's being learned from using stem cells to figure out how to put in the right genes and have them develop

normally. And also, again, to discover things about how they can go awry. Now, as far as how things can go awry, they can become cancer cells, but so far as using those to treat cancer in some way again that's i don't think anybody would do that but but they've been very useful in in learning you know

the mechanisms are working so there seems to be you know two two separate approaches one is taking these cells and learning but uh but the tree or treating treating and preventing is kind of in a different area. Yeah. Actually, I left out something that's really big. I was thinking of the public perception of stem cells, but leukemias are very often treated with stem cells. The patient's bone marrow, all of their blood-producing cells are killed with chemicals and radiation, and they're replaced then with stem cells. The patient's bone marrow, all of their blood-producing cells are killed with

chemicals and radiation, and they're replaced then with stem cells, which grow up and replace all the blood cells. And there's been some thought in some other cancers that you could do the same thing. Yes. But so far, except for leukemias, that really hasn't gone very far. People have tried it in breast cancer, but as far as I know, nothing's worked yet. So the answer is yes, but in a limited way so far. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it used to be the only way to cure leukemia was with stem cells.

Wow. And is that because when they're really kind of resetting the entire immune system because they destroy everything, right? Kind of go down to like a tabula rasa and then when you inject those stem cells, you're actually kind of like, you're jump-starting. Yeah, jump-starting.

It all starts over and replenishes everything eventually. Wow. If you're lucky, they got rid of all the cancer cells before. You know what that reminds me of? The poop transplant that they've been doing lately. You know about that one? I do. By the way,

people have chronic digestive problems and they just take they put somebody else's poop inside of them and it jumps, it restarts the flora. The biome. So it gives them a healthy gut biome.

Somebody else has a new start. Absolutely. That actually works quite well. What a number of groups have found recently, including Dr. Jennifer Wargo here at MD Anderson in melanoma, you can sort of get an idea of whether somebody's going to respond to therapy or not by the kind of bacteria they have in their in their poop if you will and so there's some thought and we're actually working with with her a little bit on this of uh trying to find out what the real good bacteria are and you know and giving them to patients while they're getting their immunotherapies sounds like some crappy research i i couldn't help it i know hit me go ahead i deserve it i deserve it i deserve it

all right um this is serious frost uh from twitter and he says uh or she says because it doesn't give a gender uh do you think that and this is for both of you guys i don't know do you think that with the recent spate of development in quantum computing, we would see the rise of nanotechnology as a feasible solution to cancer and other ailments reasonably soon? That's hard to say reasonably soon. I can tell you what I know, and I'd be delighted to then defer over to Jim. Think about it. If you construct anything, I'm going to give a cosmic perspective on this. Okay. If you construct anything, it'll, in the end of the day, it has, it will relate to

what is the size of the thing that your tool can manipulate. Okay. So if it's a brick building, then you had grabbed bricks and you put bricks in place. Right. Okay. But if you want to make something smaller than a brick, then you need a tool that's smaller than the brick holder. You need, like, tweezers. Okay? Now, if you want to make something smaller than what tweezers make, you need something than the thing that it is you're making.

All right? So, if you're going to make molecules, you need tools that are smaller than the molecule to assemble... To build the molecule. To build the molecule. Okay. That are smaller than the molecule to assemble. To build the molecule. To build the molecule.

Okay. So there's quantum tools that have, in fact, one of the Nobel Prizes this year in 2018, if I remember the bio of it, references tools that enable you to manipulate atoms and particles. And if you can do that, if the folks in the cancer research say, you know what we need? We need this other molecule in this particular way, in this particular configuration, then I bring in the nanotools, the nanotool box.

And then he can bring his genius to the problem. Yeah, there are a lot of people working on that, just as you said, because you can make things to deliver drugs with a lot of precision and deliver multiple things at the same time. So there's a lot of activity there. Some of it looks pretty promising. I'm going to take host privilege and ask the last question. I just happen to be sitting in front of a book written by a colleague of mine.

It's called Cosmic Discovery. This was published like 30, 40 years ago. But this was very influential on me because as an astrophysicist, I said, I want to see what he says about discovery. And you read through it and half the book is a description of how advances in modern astrophysics only came about because of some advance in another field, in particular physics. The physicist invented some other detector or some other tool or some other thing. Then it gets applied to our work, and then we make discoveries. You were describing using radiation therapy to zap the immune system and jumpstart it.

You got that from physicists. You guys didn't invent that. We did. Okay? jump started physicists you got that from physicists you guys didn't invent that we did okay so are you are you in need of some new physics advance to help you do your work and can you comment on on the leaps that your field has taken when engineering or other technological advances show up at your doorstep yeah well i Well, I can say two things about that. One is the technological advances in computation and a lot of analytical machines that we use now that are now allowing us to figure stuff out about cancers

and what's going on inside of them with great speed and precision didn't exist four years ago or five years ago. And so there's just a lot of effort there. And then imaging, too, because we know now that it would be useful often to know what cells next to another one and what's going on. And then… So this is imaging with precision to be able to see that level of detail. Right.

And then I think there are a lot of advances being made in the treatment area of really giving more powerful radiation, a more focused way, if we could figure out how to tune that to really kill just the tumor cells and not surrounding immune tissue or anything, that might help develop really more effective ways, not a huge leap, but more effective ways of treating cancer. But certainly the analytical techniques that have come up with are just amazing. There's something that happens now that, well, not so much anymore, but in the early days of these immunotherapy drugs, tumors would sometimes get big really fast and so the doctors looking at them and the pathologist looking at would say wow

your drug is a drink answer it's making them grow faster but when you take it out cut it open it'd be full of t-cells you know what if that tumors way inside somebody you can't really do that so new imaging techniques that it would allow us to tell the difference between a cell. There are metabolic ways now of imaging them, but you can't tell the difference between a rapidly dividing T cell and a rapidly dividing cancer cell. So we need something better there to help us diagnose and follow disease.

So for me, that's a call for funding of research on all frontiers and then cross pollinating them so that all can benefit right there's none of this well let's study this kind of science now and we'll put the other kind of science on hold you just have no idea at the frontier what the what that cross benefits might be. Absolutely absolutely and one of the things that I try to do whenever I can is point out that what we found out that ended up being the basis of this new therapy, that research had nothing to do with cancer whatsoever. I was doing it because I wanted to know how T cells worked. And when I figured that out, I kind of scratched my head and went,

hey, maybe we could do something, you know, and it worked. But it wasn't the reason for doing the work. And for those who are only listening to that comment, he actually scratched his head on video. Yes, he did. When he said, I scratched my head. Right. I think we got to wrap this up. Dr. Jim, it's been a delight to have you on.

And congratulations, first, on your research, because that's what matters most, the Nobel Prize as an after-the-fact recognition of it. At the end of the day, it's your research that will make the difference in the world, not the fact that you got the Nobel Prize for it. And so I just want to thank you. It's all those people that are saved now that are the prize, really. Yes.

And I want to thank you and your team and others and just the whole enterprise of those who have given their lives to just improve the lives of others. Yeah. Yes. And although it's a shame that my mom could not benefit from the work that you've done and everybody in your field, not just you. It's a collective view. from the work that you've done and everybody in your field, not just you, it's a collective view.

The beauty of being able to see how the field operates is everything that she went through is going to help somebody else. And that's, that's the cool thing about what you do. So thank you. Okay. This has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Cancer Cure Edition

and Dr. Jim Allison again thanks for being with us thank you for giving me the opportunity I've been with my co-host Chuck Nice Chuck always good to have you here

always good to be here I am Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist and as always I bid you to keep looking up