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DNA Cancer Codes Cracked By International Effort
Enigma23 writes "As reported on news.com.au, scientists from the International Cancer Genome Consortium of 12 institutes around the world will today release the first DNA profiles of some of the most prevalent types of tumors. While the story asserts that 'A new era of cancer treatment has dawned,' I'm a bit more skeptical, given that gene therapy and immunotherapy are still very much in their infancy at the current time."
I was diagnosed with stage 5 cancer at age 17. I'm still alive at age 33.
There's not a day that goes by when I don't look at my disfigured face and wonder what thing would have been like if I'd caught it sooner- according to one doc, I'd have been dead because my body wouldn't have fought it off. Who knows.
But anything that gets a genetic component and allows them to focus better on killing off the cells that have tormented me for over a dozen years I'll be more than grateful. There isn't a trip to the doctor that doesn't send shiver of fear down my spine, whether or not I'll be able to continue to provide for my family- whether or not that cough that started was due to pollen or something else... whether or not that pain in the side is a kidney stone or something more sinister.
Cancer is a killer. Even the survivors die a little every day.
http://www.qcmg.org/cancer.html It gives a background of what they are trying to do, seems interesting.
The US of A is involved. Check out ICGC for the public release of the data. The original news source was published in Nature today.
Google "The Cancer Genome Atlas" and you will be answered. TCGA (wry joke for you molecular biologists out there) has a massive amount of NIH funding dwarfing the international effort. Publication came out a while back for glioblastoma multiforme and a different tumor publication is being prepared now. A few terabytes of publicly available data there for you to download .
Indeed, the US is sequencing more genomes than any other participating country.
The US participates via a parallel project in The Cancer Genome Atlas administered by the National Institutes of Health, which while remaining independent of the international project, shares data and tailors it's foci to not overlap with those of the ICGC.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Oops, sorry a typo on my part
s/administration/administrations/
Somebody seems to be a little defensive there :)
Let me follow-up with a car analogy: Imagine you found the blueprints for a car that had a slight problem (say occasional aberrant acceleration, for example). Sequencing cancer genomes is akin to *finding* these blueprints. But it gets worse, the blueprints are in a different language and have no idea what 70% of the parts in the plans actually DO. Yes - the blueprint is helpful. Very helpful. In fact there's not much you can do without it. But it doesn't immediately help you FIX the problem. The only feature of DNA that is truly a *code* that was had to be *cracked* was the triplet code for amino acids and that was cracked by Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg in the '60s.
it can still be used to set up tiered insurance charges so that people who don't have the genes will only pay a little more for insurance than they do now (doing business as it has always been done), while people who have the genes will be in a different risk group and will be required by law to pay much higher premiums than anyone has ever had to pay before
Buh? They didn't sequence the genes of cancer patients. They sequenced the genes of the tumours themselves.
You seem to be assuming that cancer treatment has made great strides since 1970. Actually it hasn't.
It has, whether you want to admit it or not. Are you going to dismiss the ACS as a shill for the health care industry? Here (PDF file) is a pretty comprehensive overview; I direct your attention particularly to the "Trends in 5-year relative survival rates" table on page 18.
And yes, of course cancer treatment centers oversell their treatments. But your claim that:
Actually most cancers have pretty much the same prognosis today they did in 1970.
is absolutely false. You do a nice bait-and-switch there, noting correctly that:
The list of cancers that was incurable in 1970 and is curable today is extremely short.
and then pretending that it supports your earlier claim. But in fact the two claims are completely different. We may not be able to cure most cancers, but we can greatly extend both the quantity and quality of life available to patients who are diagnosed with cancer relative to what we could do 40 years ago. While it is quite true that treatment for almost any kind of cancer is a miserable experience, if you think the level of misery is anywhere near what it was in 1970, then you simply haven't been paying attention.
I'm not going to argue against the idea that more basic research is needed -- hell, I work in basic biomedical research, so it would be absurd for me to make that argument. But I came here from patient care, and I can tell you that we need more research at all levels, "from bench to bedside" as the cliche goes. You can't tell a patient who's been diagnosed with a painful and probably fatal disease, "Well, we might have something that can help you fifteen years from now, but you're SOL since you'll be dead for twelve of those years."
Also, I detected a whiff of anti-government, anti-"Big Science" in your original post. Where exactly do you think the money for basic biological research comes from? Hint: it ain't Merck and Pfizer.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.