Scientists discover an RNA that repairs DNA damage
29 comments
·March 9, 2025tombert
bluGill
We have cured a lot of cancer. There is a lot left we cannot cure. Many of our cures are barely better than death.
ChrisRR
Unfortunately curing a lot of cancer cures a lot of healthy tissue too
jryb
The problem is that biology is such a huge and complex field, and there's simply no way to make progress without incremental work like this that has no immediate payoff. To even contemplate whether something like this could cure cancer means that the article completely misrepresented its value.
I think the problem is that you're viewing things as either "cures for cancer", or "not cures for cancer". I would suggest instead framing things as, "how on Earth could we possibly cure cancer when human bodies have trillions of moving parts and we only understand half of them?" It's like trying to fix a broken car and not even knowing what internal combustion is.
DrScientist
There isn't a single type of cancer, and even within cancer types there is the potential for each and every cancer to be unique in a significant way.
That's why there hasn't been some magic cure - however huge progress has been made in the past 20 years and the last 5-10 in particular - though it's difficult to disentangle the effects of new treatments from earlier diagnosis - the bottom line for many cancers now the 5 year survival rate is > 90 %.
Note such indicators are lagging - ie you have to wait 5 years to see 5 year survival data etc.
inglor_cz
"there is the potential for each and every cancer to be unique in a significant way."
True, but that does not mean that cancer doesn't have some common root cause. I think that everybody who claims that there cannot be any common cure for cancers should be able to explain two things (you can attack them as well, I will be glad to hear your responses):
A. Incidence of most cancers increases with age in a very uniform way. Like, the slopes of the curves are basically identical for very different cancers. It at least seems that "being young" translates into "being very resistant (though not immune) to many cancers at once, and "growing old" is the magic anti-cure which makes you susceptible for all sorts of cancers at the same time.
If all those diseases were genuinely different, you would expect to see more variation in their mathematical properties. There aren't such close correlations between, say, dental caries and tuberculosis. And if "growing old" acts as a "magic anti-cure", maybe there can be the opposite, too. I get that "growing young" is probably complicated, but I am not that certain if it is categorically impossible in the future.
B. Cancer is not just a human disease, but generally a mammalian disease, but some mammalian species are much less prone to cancer than others: whales, elephants, bats. And what is again interesting, is the fact that the species less prone to cancer are less prone to all types of cancer again, not just a single type or two.
Also, birds don't get nearly as many cancers as mammals do - and again, they get less cancer overall, not just one or two types.
For me, this epidemiological uniformity indicates a possible common root cause, something like "a failure of the immune system to hold bad cells in check", regardless of the vast diversity of the symptoms.
For a rough analogy: people dying of AIDS will succumb to a wild variety of deadly infections, but that does not mean that AIDS is a family of very different diseases. It just means that their immune system stopped being able to hold multiple different foes in check. And once you can stop HIV from ravaging the immune system of the patients, all of these diverse deadly infections are prevented at once.
DrScientist
> A. Incidence of most cancers increases with age in a very uniform way.
Cancer is caused by random(ish) mutations creating cellular variants that have uncontrolled growth - typically you need multiple mutations. It's related to age mostly because you accumulate mutations over time - it's a game of chance. So the underlying cause is the same - mutations - however there are lots and lots of different ways to mutate a cell into a dangerous state ( that's not to say there are not common mutations found across lots of cancers in key regulatory targets ).
> Different species effects
I don't think this is well understood, but some of that is to do differentials in effective DNA repair or detection of cancer cells by the immune system ( you body can detect and kill cancer cells as if they were foreign invaders ). The other thing is perhaps less exposure to mutation causing agents ( humans are probablyt exposured to lots of mutagenic things at a low level we don't really know about yet - scandals of the future ) - and birds not getting cancer is probably mostly they don't live long enough.
And finally if your cancer get's to a later stage - typically it just hasn't picked up mutations to grow faster it's probably picked up mutations allow it to evolve faster ( ie a higher mutation rate ) - they means a single cancer that started from a single cell can evolve into a tree of related cells with different sets of mutations. ) And it's those different mutations that allow cells to survive in parts of the body they weren't originally from ).
In terms of treatment of cancer you need to try and target a difference between normal and cancer cells - so you tend to go after those differences driven by the mutations - often making the treatments sub-type specific. ie this particular cancer is different from normal in this way - so we target that difference, others might be different in another.
There are some treatments that are more generic - chemo basically targets fast growing cells ( for whatever underlying reasons ) - however these don't differentiate between normal fast growing cells and cancer so they have quite nasty side effects.
starchild3001
We've cured cancer in mice many times, but in humans the disease often comes back despite some extremely targeted and successful therapies. I'm sure more is in the works and thanks to tools like alpha-fold quantum leaps in cancer treatment can be expected every 5-10 yrs.
drowsspa
Quantum leaps are what we already have: tiny and oscillating all over the place
tombert
I would absolutely love to be wrong, but I've just gotten my hopes too many times and known too many people who have died from cancer.
To be clear, I am very much not blaming the scientists for this. I'm confident that the work that they are doing is very cool and challenging. I blame science reporting for always feeling like every headline has to suggest that every discovery is going to completely change the world.
ocdtrekkie
It's worth noting that semaglutide, which is "completely changing the world" of weight loss was initially heavily researched in the 80s and 90s. Some 40-50 years later... it is as big a deal as papers probably described it at the time.
So if this NEAT1 is a big deal, it might not save our parents, but it might save our kids.
timewizard
Well considering a lot of cancers can be the result of genetics and environment than simply eliminating once is clearly never going to be a full strategy.
starchild3001
The root cause of cancer is aging. Cancer incidence increases exponentially with age, suggesting that cellular breakdown and weakened immune surveillance are the primary drivers. While environmental factors play a role, they are secondary. Consider the extremely low incidence of cancer in individuals under 40.
https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/06/cancer-r...
kazinator
Cynical view: anything that can repair DNA damage can go rampant and wreak damage.
Ferret7446
Someone has to say it, but if we were to forgo safety and morals, we could speed up medical progress by a lot. All of that safety comes at a cost.
Japan during WW2 committed many atrocious experiments, but we owe a lot of medical knowledge from that.
dakial1
It potentially could be used to stop ageing no? Isn't it mostly caused by accumulation of cell damage?
pests
Last I remember aging is primarily the telomerase unwinding at the end of each chromosome over time.
woleium
that is what i learned 25 years ago too, but apparently the leading edge of gerontology has moved on, and new theories have emerged
thaumasiotes
That was... never a theory. It can't explain aging, because telomeres are either present or not, but aging is a gradual process. (Telomerase is something entirely different, the enzyme that adds telomeres to the DNA in gametes.)
Telomeres are also unimplicated in progeria ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeria ), which would be a serious problem if people thought aging was caused by loss of telomeres.
vaylian
The shortening of the telomeres is a protective mechanism against the development of cancer. But it only applies to non-stem-cells. In contrast, (adult) stem cells keep their telomeres intact and can divide themselves an unlimited number of times. Some of the stem cells develop into non-stem-cells when the supply of non-stem-cells becomes low.
There are many factors to aging. DNA damage, that is not repaired, accumulates over the years. And then there are also damages to the tissue on the microscopic and on the macroscopic scale that don't fully heal.
Levitating
Human senescence consists of many different processes, telomere attrition is one of them.
Frederation
Announcers voice, 'No'
westurner
ScholarlyArticle: "NEAT1 promotes genome stability via m6A methylation-dependent regulation of CHD4" (2025) https://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/38/17-20/915
westurner
"Supercomputer draws molecular blueprint for repairing damaged DNA" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349021
This seems cool, and it would be great if this does cool stuff like cure or prevent some forms of cancer, but I've kind of learned to not get my hopes up with medical news.
It's felt like a cure for cancer is "just around the corner" for at least the last ~20 years, and I'm sure that cancer therapy has absolutely improved a lot in the last 20 years, but we're very far from what a lot of science journalism articles have promised us.