Posted on 04/01/2007 6:08:32 PM PDT by neverdem
TO a public now accustomed to calls for “a cure for cancer,” it can come as an unpleasant surprise to learn about the complexities of cancer. “Cancer” is not one disease, but a category encompassing many different diseases, and we are more likely to see incremental advances against individual types of cancers than universal cures.
But there is also promise in this more nuanced view. The great variety of cancers reflects the fundamental mechanism by which the disease arises: the different combinations of genetic variations that cause normal cells to grow excessively and behave badly. These cancer-causing mutations may be inherited or, more commonly, incurred after birth, and our ability to describe them offers entry to a world in which cancer can be better controlled. We already know a few hundred of the genes that are mutated in various cancers, and we are poised to discover virtually all of them through a new kind of “genome project” that is just beginning.
An obvious application of genetic knowledge about specific cancers is the development of drugs and antibodies that reverse the effects of the mutations in those cancers. Some success in this difficult endeavor has already been achieved — in the clinic, not just the laboratory. But new genetic knowledge can also be used to assess an individual’s inherited risk of developing certain kinds of cancer or to predict the likely behavior of any identified tumor.
Hereditary risks of developing cancer can now be determined by examining about 30 different genes that can cause changes associated with certain cancers. This information can be enormously beneficial by encouraging early screening or preventive surgery. But it can also create anxieties about genetic discrimination, upset families and raise disturbing questions about who should be tested and when. Most of the known mutations are so...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Some aren't interested in cures for cancer, if they are more "nuanced" and reported on by the NYT.
Others are.
Traffic in the intersection of pharmacology and genetics will be kept to a crawl, thanks to Managed Care - another form of malignancy.
Cure cancer? Please. It's the AMA's biggest money maker.
btt
I predicted that very fact as I was reading through this tripe.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
This is the model of cancer research and cancer treatment.
Without innovative thinking, there will be no innovation.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
This is the model of cancer research and cancer treatment.
Without innovative thinking, there will be no innovation."
They are not doing the same thing over and over. But it can be argued there are many areas where there could be improvements.
One telling moment was when Andrew Grove of Intel fame (a most acerbic critic of the "cancer establishment" in America) put it to Varmus and company in an interview. He asked (I'm paraphrasing) "If you were to take apart the whole system of drug discovery, testing, clinical trials, regulatory review and put it back together, would it be the same." The embarassed silence after his question spoke volumes. There was no way they could say it would be different. To cover their smarmy Nobel-prized covered asses, they had to say yes it would be the same. It was a wonderful engineering-oriented question. The question also reflected a critical difference between scientists and engineers. Scientists are totally devoid of the concept of "building something" and therefore do not have the goal oriented mindset of constructing a system that follows design principles which will reasonably ensure successful results as a functioning entity. Without that mindset you get a somewhat random, very leaky, cantankerous, unreliable, and dysfunctional system. Moreover, I would argue that the proliferation of specializations within specializations while talking about building integrated teams out of these specialists is further evidence of the dysfunctional nature of the cancer establishment. Multidisciplinary means nothing if you do not have people who can make sense of it, see patterns of organization and innovation that others miss, and be able to exploit those opportunities.
I could go on. The point is
Your missing the critical difference between scientists and engineers. Engineers as a general rule know what they are dealing with and adjust variables. Research scientists stumble in the dark of biomedical science finding things that they didn't know all the time. Just look at genetics and interference RNA or what they use to call "junk DNA".
There's plenty of innovation and innovative thinking. It's the testing and approval system that, IMHO, is fouling things up. One need look no further than the testing of drugs for acute myeloid leukemia, one of the nastiest cancers around, and one of the most hetergenous, yet numerous drugs and protocols have been sidelined because they do not work for the 'average' AML patient - despite the fact there is really no 'average' AML patient when it comes to the molecular characteristics of the driving abnormalities that have caused their disease.
How right you are, read "The Ph Mircle" and learn the truth!
Your points about AML are well-taken (and sad).
Yes, I am speaking to lack of innovation on the whole, in the entire process of envisioning drugs to testing them to envisioning a new way of prescribing (patient-driven).
It's quite similar in rheumatic diseases. I've come to believe that all the inflammatory diseases have fundamentally the same cascade at the origination point, but express themselves in each patient in an infinite number of ways.
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