Shrinking tumors is good. It's also important to stop cancer from metastasizing. I guess this drug might end up being used as a long term "maintenance" therapy.
But I personally hope for a cancer therapy which goes beyond playing whack-a-mole against tumors. Maybe one day they'll gain a more fundamental understanding.
Maybe one day they'll actually know why the body begins to form these tumors, why its built-in anti-cancer mechanisms fail or become overwhelmed, and, most important, how to restore or unblock the body's own ability to control and limit cancer cells.
I don't think there is any great mystery there - mutation and copy errors create the initial conditions that lead to loss of function of tumor supressor genes or in of function in oncogenes, caused by known risk factors and some unknown risk factors we are still elucidating.
There isn't a much more fundamental understanding that can be gained. We know all of this, we are beginning to elucidate the chromosomal translocations and karyotypes that seem to appear in certain families of cancers (and a specific cancer type will have the same 'assortment' of chromosomal typings)
all that remains is to continue to design increasingly effective anti-cancer agents, one part of which this article is explaining.
I don't believe there will be a single magic bullet, however treatments that have an immunological basis (See this NEJM paper that offers incredible hope for CLL - http://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1103849 )
Or antibody based Rx coupled to cytotoxics or radiologicals as an adjuvant Rx, as well as the success of the designed molecules such as Imatinib etc all bode well for the future.
Unfortunately the big C will evolve it's way out of many of these therapies (Imatinib etc inhibit fusion proteins created in aberrant cells that lead to proliferation, slowing but not necessarily stopping growth, so the cell evolves around it)
But is there any hope that medicine will find a way to enhance or strengthen any of the body's mechanisms for controlling these mutated cells and this erroneously copied DNA?
yes - sort of - that's what the paper is about essentially - it details a gene therapy approach where T cells are removed, taught how to recognise surface antigens for leukaemia cells and re-injected into the body, leading in 3 weeks to a complete clearance of his CLL which he had had for 13 years and which was close to killing him.
Now THAT is a cure. So the immune system may be the key to doing this.
but for what you are asking:
Things we can do now:
- We can take things that lessen the chance of this damage occurring in the first place (Anti-oxidants, good diet, 'everything in moderation', etc)
- We can modify our lifestyle to avoid risk factors (Cut smoking, drinking, drugs, bad food)
- We can actively do things that are likely to strengthen our immune system and the constant immuno-surveillance that it performs, that already stop us from developing cancer at age 1 (Exercise, good sleep)
Things we Can't do:
: Because of lack of precedent, failure of mechanism, or lack of scientific enabling principle (Your 'dead end')
- We will probably NEVER (although that's a strong word in scientific progress - let's say not for the foreseeable future, 25-30-40 years) be able to take a pill that will REVERES the damage once it's done
- We will probably NEVER (with the usual caveats) be able to take a 'simple' drug molecule, as we understand the word to mean at the moment, to kill cancer cells wherever they are in the body
: Because we just don't understand enough about how to do this:
- We lack enough understanding to say what would happen if we were potentially able to design a molecule that acted as a 'backup' to the main TSP, p53, and were able to somehow deliver it into the cell to be a 'backup' tumour suppressor and make the cell autodestruct if it got out of control
I could go on and on about theorised Rx'es, things we do now, things we are just bringing online, and how I think it will all go down but that's probably enough for a buried response in HN that few people will ever read.
However if you have any more specific questions or I can help you understand something else, ask away
Not necessarily. There was some sad findings that tumor shrinking chemicals caused fragmentation and mobility.
I've recently talked with a student researching on Warburg Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect , linking switch in metabolic regime (mitochondrial damage) to disabling the apoptosis mechanism. Their idea is to repair mitochondria so that cells will terminate themselves as usual using nanoparticules.
But I personally hope for a cancer therapy which goes beyond playing whack-a-mole against tumors. Maybe one day they'll gain a more fundamental understanding.
Maybe one day they'll actually know why the body begins to form these tumors, why its built-in anti-cancer mechanisms fail or become overwhelmed, and, most important, how to restore or unblock the body's own ability to control and limit cancer cells.