The standout announcement from the recent Foresight Vision Weekend came from Openwater, who presented a novel cancer treatment.
I’ve been a bit slow to write about it, in part because my initial reaction was that it’s too good to be true, and most big claims of medical advances are not true.
TL;DR: They’ve developed a cheap ultrasound device that can selectively kill cancer cells by exploiting their unique resonant frequencies, similar to how an opera singer can shatter a wine glass.
Why This Might Be Real:
- Founder Mary Lou Jepsen has an impressive track record and appears to be motivated by her experience from having cancer
- Competent investors are backing the project
- The approach is novel enough that it might have been overlooked by traditional medical researchers
- Device-based treatments face fewer regulatory hurdles than drugs
- Ultrasound has a well-established safety profile
- The mechanism seems to only affect the targeted cell type, so there’s less risk of side effects than with most medical treatments
- They have promising results from a small mouse trial, where tumors shrunk
Reasons for Caution:
- Limited public data – where’s the survival time data from that mouse trial?
- Unclear what fraction of cancer types will have exploitable resonant frequencies
There’s likely to be some cost to figuring out the relevant frequency for each cancer cell type, but I don’t see how that can be prohibitive.
I’m rather skeptical of Openwater’s claims that the FDA will be easier to deal with if they give it unusally large amounts of data. But the worst case there is just modest delays due to the FDA taking more time than usual to sift through all the data.
To track Openwater’s progress, I’ve created prediction markets for FDA approval and number of patients treated.
For more information:
I can’t find any notable red flags beyond the shortage of data.
The red flags are that the preprint – ish document in the github repo strongly suggests no biologists were involved in the experiments & also that they appear to be claiming to treat nearly every condition a person can have. I want it to work, but they desperately need to get a biologist involved.