Cool, thanks for your reply (and those replies below also). I briefly skimmed the article however was sidetracked with work, and admittedly a lot went over my head anyway.

The article is really nicely written. I'd be happy to answer any questions about it.

As a regular man in the street, how excited should I be about this?

What's the chance of this developing into a regular treatment for most types of cancers, within, say, the next ten years?

as a former immunooncology scientist i'd say you should be guardedly optimistic. you should be aware that there probably won't be a generalized cancer cure, but i think we'll be starting to tackle a lot of different cancers in the next 2-3 years, just like we have been for the previous 3-5 years. beyond that, who knows.

immunotherapies don't work for 100% of people or 100% of cancers, and some cancers seem to grow resistant to some immunotherapies after multiple rounds of treatment.

there are a lot of limitations and strengths of immunotherapies that we don't even have a clue about yet-- by my totally made up estimation we have about 10% of the puzzle figured out, an additional 30% which we have partial or incorrect understandings of (but at least we realize it and are working to clarify things), and 60% remains unknown unknowns.

but remember: we don't need to understand quantum gravity or have much knowledge of how gravity works whatsoever to make an airplane that defies gravity at our will. it's the same way with immunotherapies, except replace "gravity" with "cancer." we can do an awful lot with what we know.

immunotherapies are incredible-- literally the data is often unbelievable at first glance.

Thanks for the info!

For people outside this field of work like me (a software / cleantech guy), is there a concise spreadsheet to show the state-of-the-art?

i.e. Listing different types of cancers with the most promising immunotherapy treatments for each type, expected confidence and success rates, trials that one can enroll into?

It'd be a good first place to go to whenever we hear of someone who has 'cancer' - that word is so generic that it's hard to figure out what our action item should be.

> is there a concise spreadsheet to show the state-of-the-art

doubtful imo. the state of the art is rapidly changing, and plenty of things are happening behind closed doors.

clinicaltrials.gov is your best bet but the expected success rates is not something anyone would willingly have as public information.

Follow up-if big pharma does not pick it up, how much would it a start up need to take it to market?

It's a novel approach, so there is more risk and more reward. I'd guess that it has a 5% chance of making it to market. Most likely, it's ineffective or unsafe (autoimmunity or a more mundane side effect), but it's also possible that that it's effective for many cancers or has very low side effects.