Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
9:14 · 10M views · May 9, 2023
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.
HN recommends it as a clear, accessible introduction to cancer and the immune system.
3 comments from Hacker News
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 the older stuff, or stuff that's just been approved. And even through all of that, it's a crap shoot as to whether it will work or not. I took 2 conjugates, in the same class of medication - each had a slightly different chemo med. One worked fabulously, about halved the size of my main tumor. The other did nothing, and ended up giving me neuropathy in my feet (it can be numbness, but in my case it felt like my feet were on fire, 24/7. I am on a medication now to fix that, and my feet feel totally normal). Fun fact - the neuropathy chances for that med were stated as 0%. I guess someone rounded down from 0.1%, because I got it.
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
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.