I really hate it when people express a predictable sentiment along the lines of "herp derp, digg/reddit/HN cured cancer again! It must be Tuesday!" While it's necessary to be reserved, scientific progress, especially in biomedical fields should be celebrated, not derided.
We need more researchers in the world working on these problems that benefit us all. Thinly veiled mockery of their work and the progress they're making is really unsavory and possibly quite discouraging to someone who's thinking of going into this field.
Just be grateful that progress is being made; one day you may directly benefit from that experimental drug mentioned in the article.
The complaint is levied against the reporters, not the scientists. If we actually heard from the scientists, we would generally get reserved statements about progress and good indicators. That turns into a weekly cure for cancer that doesn't really exist once we hit the "scientific" press.
In this case, it looks like the complaint is poorly founded. This is a real breakthrough working on people cancer (as opposed to mouse cancer).
When the headline "Drug made from toxic weed kills cancer" really means "Drug made from toxic weed kills [for some definitions of kill] cancer [for some definition of cancer (in mice)]", the scorn on the reporting is richly deserved. These sort of linkbaity headlines only serve to undermine the solid work and real achievements of the scientists doing the research.
The thing is - we really only need one cure for a particular strand of cancer. Once we've actually done it we've done it. Bearing this in mind I think these stories deserve a fair amount of optimism.
What do you mean by "strand of cancer"? In any given tumor, there are multiple cells lines each with their own set of mutations. That's what makes curing cancer so difficult.
This is a review of a very interesting paper recently published. 50 women with breast cancer had their tumors sequenced. The result? 1700 distinct mutations and the most common three mutations only showed up in 10% of patients.
My personal belief is that cancer will never be "cured" in the literal sense of the word. Many cancers will become chronic conditions like AIDS where life expectancy is reduced, but people diagnosed will still get to enjoy a majority of the average life span.
If there are so many strains of cancer for each patient, those patients do have multiple diseases and we should treat them with multiple drugs.
There's a medical device that lets you test the response of the patient's biopsy to multiple drug combinations.
I wonder if scaling this by:creating huge libraries of cancer drugs that only passed animal safety trials, using this test device to find the most effective combination of large amounts of drugs(maybe even combine drugs that fit the genetic profile of the biopsy strains) and using the combination but carefully managing dosage not to create toxicity , could be useful and practical to fight those mutation rich cancers ?
refurb is right - we essentially do this now,
our limitations are:
- Cost of sequencing
- Toxicity of current drugs in combination
- lack of suitable drugs
- lack of patient trials
More on the last:
This is on which everything depends. Medical ethics 'bends' a lot of allowances with regard to anti-cancer drugs because of the stakes but you can't just start introducing things willy-nilly. A new drug does not a cure make. And drugs have interactions, sometimes serious. Using one new drug may lead to some shift of the survival curve (or at least shrinkage of tumour, maybe it is now more susceptible to Surgery/Radiation or is just going to give them better quality of life) but adding additional drugs may reverse this trend if they are not properly researched
All this requires money
All this takes years
But a surprising amount is already in progress. Sitting in on case conferences with practicing Oncologists and Radiologists, they have combinations of drugs with strange names 'R-CHOP' etc - have a wiki - to roll out against standards, are always reciting the latest literature, trying to get patients into new trials that show promise, all in the hope of continually shifting the survival curve further to the right
That's actually not a bad idea, because we kinda of do that right now, just very inefficiently.
I'm sure 10-20 years from now, we'll have a collection of drugs that target specific mutations in cancer (the number is already getting large).
Doing it via a med device is actually not a terrible idea. You can at least screen for the mutations, but predicting how the drugs will act in the human body (especially in combination) is much tougher.
However, with many forms of cancer, there are very few options, so higher risk method of treatment are much more tolerable.
yes it's called chemo sensitivity test, but how many people ask for it? also you can test for expression of various genes, which would help eliminate drug that are know not to work with a particular gene being expressive.
unfortunately, today patients know too little; there is too much reliance on doctors, but I am working to change that.
When it comes to medical science, I would take skepticism over optimism any day. Many promising drugs have made it through the first rounds of trials, only to fall flat later on. Let's save the optimism for drugs that actually make it through to market.
