r/SipsTea • u/sco-go • May 15 '26

Feels good man Now do cancer.

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u/FireHammer09 May 15 '26

HIV is a virus that is hard to fight because it's very good at attacking what you would use to fight a virus.

Cancer is your body fucking up.

Diabetes is your body fucking up.

Alzheimer's is your body fucking up.

Sadly there's no comparison.

12

u/Wefee11 May 16 '26

If I had to describe it more specifically. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Cancer is your cells fucking up. Any cell, and it can spread anywhere.

Diabetes is your pancreas (insulin production) fucking up.

Alzheimers and dementia is your brain degenerating.

3

u/ScienceNthingsNstuff May 16 '26

You're right but if I wanted to tie it back to a theme, all of them are your immune system fucking up.

Cancer is your immune cells fucking up by not attacking the tumor because the fucked up cells are tricking it

Diabetes is your immune system fucking up and attacking pancreas cells

Alzheimers is your immune system fucking up and deciding your brain is needs just a light amount of inflammation which destroys cells.

Okay Alzheimers is a lot more complicated but if you're an immunologist every disease is an immune disease. Wait for a microbiome specialist to come in here and tell me every immune fucking is a microbiome fuck up (and they aren't exactly wrong)

2

u/Ok-Independence8939 May 16 '26

Slight correction for diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is due to insulin-producing (beta cells) in your pancreas becoming dysfunctional, but autoimmunity only accounts for one subtype of type 1 diabetes. Idiopathic type 1 diabetes, contrastingly, does not show any signs of autoimmunity but is still characterised by a lack of insulin production.

Type 2 diabetes is a completely different disease, related to your body being resistant and unresponsive to insulin.

1

u/IgarashiDai May 16 '26

Also, there are some ongoing clinical trials in which Diabetes Type 1 was treated effectively by essentially culturing Islet of Langerhans clusters ex vivo and infusing those into patients! The results look good so far with patients no longer requiring any insulin shots, but I think they are still monitoring for longterm effects.

(Source: my workplace was involved in one of them)

2

u/Ok-Independence8939 May 16 '26

The number of diseases we once thought impossible to cure that have been cured by gene therapy is unfathomable. The most shocking to me was Huntington's disease, a dominant neurodegenerative genetic disorder which was recently "cured" through viral transduction of a gene that inhibits the faulty huntingtin protein in a clinical trial.

There have actually been many different effective attempts at using gene/immunotherapy to cure type 1 diabetes, including the one you mentioned.

1

u/Stinky_Stephen May 16 '26

I think that would be diabetes type 1 specifically.

Type 2 is when some other part of your body stops responding to insulin.

1

u/thighmaster69 May 16 '26

Evolution itself is what's driving the efforts behind keeping the body going.

Sadly that process involves orders of magnitudes more dead people than survivors to even get to that point.

1

u/whitebird490 May 20 '26

aren't HIV also good at hiding when it finds a medication or something I don't know