Mauri

“Stage 4 cancer" gets heard as a death sentence, but it isn’t one. It’s a description of location. Staging answers a single question: where is the cancer? Stage 4 means it has spread beyond the organ it started in, and nothing more than that. It doesn’t tell you how aggressive the tumor is, what drives it or how long someone has. We hear it as a verdict because for a long time it mostly was, and that has changed unevenly. Metastatic testicular cancer is cured in around 90% of men, and advanced Hodgkin lymphoma is similar, both were near-uniformly fatal a few decades ago. Colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver or lungs can sometimes be removed surgically, with people disease-free a decade later. Metastatic melanoma used to kill within months and now has patients off treatment years on with clean scans. Ofc, for several cancers, stage 4 remains incurable: Pancreatic cancer in that stage won't be cured for most patients despite recent progress. But incurable and untreatable are different words, and confusing them costs people time they could have had. When you look up survival statistics, you are reading history: a 5 year figure published today describes people diagnosed seven to ten years ago and treated with what existed then. Where treatment has moved fast, that number is systematically pessimistic about the person sitting in front of me, because the patients living the current numbers haven’t been counted yet. So the questions that matter aren’t about the number. What’s the molecular profile of the tumor, is there a targetable driver, is there a trial, can anything be removed or radiated? Stage 4 is where the cancer is. It isn’t how long you have.

So get this...a stranger DM'd me on X and offered to help design my backup cancer drug. For free! His name is Jan Domanski @jandom_random. He runs science at @open_fold, an open-source AI model that predicts how proteins and drugs physically fit together. My cancer is driven by one broken protein called ALK. Lorlatinib (the daily pill I take) jams itself into it and shuts it down. It's working. But resistance isn't an if, it's a when. The tumor mutates the pocket and the drug stops fitting. So Jan started modeling it on his own time, burning his own tokens. He ran AI models against ALK and lorlatinib, mapping where the known escape mutations land. And what did he find? Most of them hit right in the drug's pocket, swapping small pieces for bigger ones that physically block the drug. That's the good kind of bad news. A pocket problem is something you can design around. But the normal route to a new drug is ~2 years and ~$4-5M just to be ready for human testing. Jan's dream is getting a medicine to one patient in ~1 month. I'm not taking a homemade molecule while lorlatinib works. But if it ever fails....shit...I've got a guy! I started posting actively on X just a few weeks ago and it has brought me together with the most amazing, generous people!

Anthropic gave me $30,000 in Claude credits to research my own tumor I wrote what I built since March. I’m looking for someone who can manufacture a personalized vaccine, and a hospital that can give it

We're also hiring to scale this up! PopVax.com/jobs

Launching RNAFoundry.com – we manufacture personalized cancer vaccines.

Thank you Colleagues for a phenomenal #ESMO26 ESMO in Madrid is a wrap, and we are grateful to everyone who shared, discussed, debated and amplified the science this week. You turned five days in Madrid into a truly global conversation. 🌍 OUR Network's MISSION: Keep our colleagues worldwide Up To date in REAL TIME. 📣 101.7M impressions of potential reach 💬 6.1K posts on X from 988 participants in 34 countries ⚡ 43.1 posts per hour across the meeting days 😊 45% positive sentiment, with only 6% negative Real-time metrics powered by ACUVOX. WWW.ACUVOX.IO 🏆 Top influencers @DrChoueiri, @StephenVLiu, @PTarantinoMD, @dr_yakupergun, @HHorinouchi, @zklaassen_md, @stolaney1, @ArndtVogel, @DrYukselUrun, @DraMartinezLago, @tompowles1, @SuyogCancer, @adamfeuerstein, @ScaltritiLab, @GIMedOnc, @ScottGottliebMD, @barriere_dr, @_ShankarSiva, @miriamgonp, @TiansterZhang, @matteolambe, @NiuSanford, @christine_lovly, @amerseburger, @GlopesMd, @montypal, @Icro_Meattini, @PGrivasMDPhD, @brian_rini, @CathyEngMD, @apolo_andrea, @AndreaNecchi, @DrSGraff, @graokane, @to_be_elizabeth, @ElisaAgostinett, @nataliagandur, @UOzkerim, @DrMirallas, @Lucarecco, @mzugman, @p_ciracimd, @DrVilmaPBarcia, @MarioBalsaMD, @scocmem, @GaiaGriguolo, @JankovicK, @Dr_Oncologista 🌎 Where the conversation came from North America led with 1,940 posts, followed closely by Europe with 1,777. Boston, Madrid and New York were the most active cities. 🔬 Top studies by impact 1️⃣ DeLLphi-305 (SCLC): 4.0M reach, 170 posts 2️⃣ VOLGA (bladder): 3.7M reach, 141 posts 3️⃣ KRASCENDO-1 (NSCLC): 3.5M reach 4️⃣ SAFFRON (NSCLC): 3.3M reach 5️⃣ INTerpath-001 (melanoma): 154 posts Pinging our Collaborators