Well, it does look promising, but I wouldn't call it more than that just yet. It's just one mouse compared to one other mouse and that in itself does not prove anything (there's a thing called chance that can heavily influence the outcome). That said, when penicillin was first "invented" (for lack of a better word for it), they tested it on one soldier and also had a profound effect on him. But as an example of another outcome, I can tell you of a patient with a completely blocked carotid artery on both sides (the blood vessels in your neck that supply your brain with oxygen/nutrients) where they did stenting (opening the vessel from within and leaving a stent to keep it open) on both sides that had no complication and led to an improved quality of life.
In the academic hospital in Groningen, they tried doing that as well, but it in the first 10 patients, 2 died from bleeding inside the head after the procedure.
A study with just 1 subject doesn't always provide answers you are looking for
There's also the question of the difference in physiology between mice and men as well as the living standard of mice and men, the feeding habit of mice and men. You can't make a parallel between this research and how people would react to it. I can think of many questions in the method this research was conducted, though I'm sure most of them will have satisfying answers, but some of them might not. Were the mice genetically altered (knock-out genes) to miss a certain protein for example? What do they mean with "a normal diet"?
Research is very heavily funded by companies and they decide what gets published or not. Not only that, there's a thing called publication bias, which basically means that if your research shows no clear advantage or even a disadvantage from a new drug/method, then there's a higher chance the paper won't be published. About 30% of the case reports that had no favourable effect were not published because of this publication bias. (this is of course an estimation). And you will find various outcomes to studies. Aspartame is a famous example; some doctors are on a crusade against aspartame and have found increases in brain cancer and other diseases in their studies, but it has been researched extensively and they are in the clear minority; most studies find no correlation between aspartame and diseases occurring. Makes you wonder how the positive studies were conducted
The fact that the FDA was not involved in this project is very suspect to me and makes it very likely that the company did a lot to make it look good.
Homeopathy is another subject that is always advertised as the new thing to get you healthy and slow down aging, but there has been no proof that it actually works. The lancet has given up on it entirely; they had their shot, but they are still advertised as good medicine (even though some forms of homeopathy have been shown to decrease the effectiveness of for example chemotherapy).
This is why we are very careful in medicine before we apply a new therapy; it requires rigorous testing, preferrably in big multi-center trials before we call a new treatment the best thing since sliced bread.
Interesting article about epigenetics. I was aware of the phenomenon, but not so much about the effect on cancer. Not sure what to think of MDS as a form of leukemia, though, I've known of several patients with MDS that did not have cancer cells found in their bone marrow (though the image they put on that site clearly does). I thought it was a stadium before actual leukemia, where not everybody develops it, even if the percentage is very high. The new drug he describes seems like a variant of capecitabine, which is a well-established drug in the treatment of cancer already (breast cancer and colon cancer for example as well as AML already), which makes me wonder what the results are in comparison to capecitabine (newer drugs are always more expensive, and therefore more attractive to research for pharmaceutical companies).
Generally, new medicine first creates a buzz: "this is the miracle cure!", then a buzz-kill cause of finding out side effects: "We must stop using them immediately, because there are so many side effects!" and finally a thorough considerion of the pros and cons, either incorporating them in our little books (eg prednison in the 80s) or throwing them out entirely (eg rofecoxib in the last decade, though the latter may not have reached the final stage yet)
Sorry for the long post
But my time in writing a scientific paper has made me highly sceptical of new treatments (though of course, not obstinate in that I deny all of them automatically
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