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Kills Tumors Dead
KeelSpawn writes "Today's cancer drugs are notorious for killing healthy cells along with cancerous ones. A new anticancer approach could offer a more precise option: kill just the tumor by choking off its blood supplies. The first drugs based on this approach are now in human trials and, if they work, could provide a virtually side-effect-free means of fighting a host of cancers."
I don't how bitter it sounds to say that this hype does a great job of continuing the funding of cancer research, but the "Breakthrough" of angio-statin in 1998 still hasn't "cured cancer".
For folks here at /. you might appreciate the problem cancer really is (a little better) by an analogy to software.
Every cell has a full copy of the sourcecode for the body. Every day there are billions of errors introduced into this codebase (smoking is the largest cause of bit-rot here btw). DNA can be repaired most of the time if there is enough of the right micronutrients available (the best way to protect yourself from cancer is make sure your diet is rich in these micro-nutrients aka vit-amin(e)s - and stop smoking). But when it can't be repaired and if that specific code is run through the 'compiler' (in this case to produce a protein or what-not), since the code is bunk, the result will not be right. Now remember, this happens billions (if not more) times per day right there inside of you! Billions and billions of such errors over time (like the infinte monkey & typewriter combination) might turn out a source error that doesn't produce something completely garbage, rather that one-in-a-10^x chance produces a change in the cell that disables its built-in function to die at the specified time. One little cell out of the 100 trillion or so, doesn't sound like a problem. But that cell, if otherwise not broken, goes on to make two friends (splits into clones of itself), and they make two friends, and so on, and so on.
This mass of broken-source created cells is generically called "cancer". But as you can see this one "feature" called cancer manifests out of every different kind of cell in the body, all of which respond differently to anti-cancer medicines.
Though there has been a lot of awesome changes to cancer treatments over the past decade, still (in the USA) upwards of 500k people die / annum, and over 1.2M people are newly diagnosed. Over $100B is spent in finding "the cure".
To sum up, I just don't like the kind of hype+hope "miracle cure coming rsn" that sells newspapers, since the 1 trillion dollars that have been spent over the past decade or so on finding this "cure" belays any simple solution at all.
(posting as AC cause it sucks to have been through the experimental trials with that hope-springs-eternal feeling, and to face the worst grief at the end, feeling like "thanks for nothing, science")
2bitter
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DNA & Cancer from the horse's mouth, Dr. Ames (as in the Ames test for carcinogenity!)
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