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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."
.. an experimental treatment I remember hearing about a few years ago-- A while ago there was talk of a similar approach using thalidomide, a drug banned a few dacades ago. In the 1950's it caused a large number of deformed infants (so-called "flipper babies") when their mothers took it while pregnant.
It works by inhibitiing the growth of blood vessels. Which is fine for adults because grown people don't grow new vessels very often under normal circumstances, but when a tumor is growing, it does need new vessals-- thalidomide inhibits that and the tumour is starved of blood supplies.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
might be Genitope. Their method for controlling/curing indolent Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma seem to be way ahead of the curve.
There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).
Actually, that's exactly what anti-angiogenic drugs help fight against. The spreading cancer cells will die off because they cannot find a place to take root and grow before the immune system takes care of them. New tumors require blood vessels to feed them above a certain size. This drug prevents them from building that network of blood vessels.
Anti-angiogenic drugs have been in testing for awhile now. I remember hearing about them a couple of years ago. I'm curious to see if they've tested to see what happens when a patient is injured or works out while using these drugs. In both cases, they will need to regenerate damage to their blood vessels.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If I understood my quick overview of DNA correctly, cancer cells are a very rare but normal consequence of replication, as you seem to point out. However, the body's immune system has the ability to kill off these cells. IANAD, but I suspect it only becomes a problem if some critical threshold is reached where the system can no longer keep up with production. I guess this means that if a person lives long enough, they *will* get cancer. I suppose we all die of something sooner or later, but life doesn't end after death so I wouldn't get too down about it. Besides, from what I hear, and I don't know if this was the case for your relatives or not, they can treat terminal cancer patients with drugs to make them relatively comfortable even through death.
I do see your point though. I too think it would be unfair to give people false expectations about new "cures", especially if the information affects them personally. People should have a right to know as much as they can understand about the possible benefits and side effects. Different people are going to make different choices about how much they want to fight. I imagine that type of information would be an important part of this decision.
Incidentally, I thought this whole starve the cells of blood thing has been around for quite a while. Did your relatives participate in any trials that tested this?