TownieDeac
words are futile devices
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- Mar 16, 2011
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I picked this out because I think it highlights the biggest problem for moonshot cure. Besides the fact that cure is probably the wrong word to begin with, cure for most cancers is thrown out where in reality delayed should probably be the better term. CML for example (known or unknown by townie that he is talking about Philly again, as its a translocation of the "Philadelphia chromosome") the drugs attributed to Sawyer aren't like take this antibiotic and you are good. The five year survival rate is still only 60% or so for those two drugs.
For a lot of aggressive cancers that people work on technology that gets them to 30%+ survival rate is consider amazing and tons of money is poured into the research. For example CAR T cells which are very hot right now. The list of problems for CAR T cells is massive yet dozens of specialized companies have popped up overnight using specifically this technology, based off some very poor survival rates and the easiest possible targets out there, non-solid blood cancers.
I think the biggest promise right now is in immuno-oncology since current regiments even for what are considered simple cancers rely on treatments that in themselves give multiple hits to people that are clearly already susceptible to the development of cancer. Yet, like I said before the excitement for the technology to survival rates doesn't align. People will be surely disappointed in the future if the purpose of all of this is to get towards most cancers being cured when in reality its delayed death of 5-10 years. Maybe not though since people love to think organ transplants are a save all and the 10-20 year survival rate for those is about 50%. Life over death I suppose.
Good point. Cure is a misnomer in many cases in cancer - mostly we should say "extending life."
Cancer treatment is hard for a lot of reasons. Tumor heterogeneity is a big one - no two tumors are really, fully alike. Communication between clinics on tumor genotypes is going to be huge.
I agree that Immuno is the way to go (and CRISPR). Here's a good review of the state of the field, prevention, precision medicine, and immuno-oncology: http://cancerpreventionresearch.aacrjournals.org/content/9/1/2.full