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Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks
Anomalyst writes "Mice were implanted with cancer. The control group died as tumors metastasized. The experimental group was treated with macroketone and survived a normal lifespan. While the cancer was not cured, metastasis was significantly (over 80%) inhibited. Even after metastasis had begun and additional cancers developed, macroketone inhibited subsequent metastasis. The original article is in Nature behind a paywall."
This post is a thank you for your contribution. It is heartfelt.
Cancer is bad. Implanting cancer into mice is bad for the mice. But it is good for humans.
Because we hate mice.
Since the side effects don't appear to significantly increase mortality this should obviously be given an immediate fastrack for human trials and should get to Phase III ASAP.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So does this mean there is no harm in smoking a celebratory cigar?
Thank God! Mice of the world can now sleep easy at night.
I know you need funding, but could you please not sell your research to publishing companies that have paywalls like this? There are open-access peer-reviewed journals for many fields nowadays.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
See also http://www.physorg.com/news190482866.html
Wonder drug could save human lives left, right, and center. FDA won't approve it without decades of testing because it's "too risky" to try an experimental drug out on patients who are likely to die anyway. Film at 11.
Seriously, I've seen lectures in medical school by several researchers who ALSO have wonder drugs like this one. They can stick up a diagram showing exactly which molecular pathway it blocks in tumors. They can show Phase I results where 1 in 3 terminal patients in a hospice goes into complete remission from their cancer. Guess what...the drug still cannot be used...
"While the cancer was not cured"
yes lets not CURE cancer. Instead lets just treat it with a drug the person has to take over and over and over for the REST OF THERE LIFE.
Oh and of course that drug will be wicked expensive.
How much? Cuz for a whole bunch of people like me, every single medical advance means squat.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I just clicked the link in the summary and I'm reading the full article right now.
The purpose of submitting one's research to a publishing company like Nature is peer review. Once a paper is submitted, Nature goes through the task of tracking down other experts in the field. These experts are use their valuable time to analyze, critique, understand, and provide educated proofing that if/when an article is published, the science is verifiable, testable, and valid. Inevitably, many of the papers submitted don't make it past the reviewing process. There's very substantial administrative costs in coordinating all this reviewing as it marches towards being publishable. It ensures every issue contains valid and worthy results that meet high standards. And there's lots of projects fighting for the same ink space.
Then there's the cost of publishing the ink and paper.
Nature can't/doesn't pay for all this cost through ad revenue. Instead, other research institutions buck up to pay a substantial subscription fee to receive the newest results and advances available. Published scientists also receive notoriety in their field, opening up their careers to new projects with more funding. If you wish to read up on the latest issue of Nature or any other science journals, you can easily find them at your nearest university library for free viewing. Universities are happy to pay the subscription fess, since they are running these research programs in an attempt to get their university name in those very same journals.
Nobody said it'll be the only cure, lemming. If all else fails, once you pinned those tumours so they don't spread all over, you can just extract them surgically when they start to grow.
But metastases are _the_ major killer in any treatment we've developped so far. Whether it's surgical, radiological, chemotherapy, you name it. You can't irradiate the patient all over, without killing him.
It doesn't help that all those are basically just based on the idea that healthy cells have better DNA repairs than cancer cells, and cells currently dividing (which includes cancerous ones) have their DNA unspooled for copying, so they're more likely to get DNA breaks. So basically they just cause a bunch of DNA breaks everywhere, and hope they got more cancerous cells than healthy ones. It's basically akin to trying to stop a plague by shooting a shotgun into the crowd and hoping that healthy people will have more chances to survive the wounds. No, seriously, that's exactly what it does to your cells. It's a very nasty treatment for anyone who's been through it, and has the side effect of also killing any other cells which are continuously dividing, like those that give you hair or fingernails or sperm.
Being able to stop metastasizing instead of that destructive treatment may actually be a more fun alternative. In the process you shaved less years off your life expectancy than normal treatments do.
But breaking DNA randomly is very carcinogenic in itself, and may cause other cancers down the line. It's very possible to just postpone the inevitable that way. A treatment that at least stops those new cancers from spreading and killing you, may well be a life saver. That's in addition to the conventional treatment, pretty much by definition.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Review is done by 'peers' i.e. other scientists, who do this as a service - no charge. The only cost incurred by the journal is typesetting and proofreading.
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
That doesn't make him wrong. He has correctly noted that we know very little about this drug and it would be highly irresponsible to wantonly permit its use until we know more about it. It also means you are looking at a single patient and he is looking at the entire population. The FDA isn't charged with saving your individual life. The FDA is charged with ensuring that drugs and medical treatments are effective, reasonably safe and have known and tested side effects. The gold standard for doing this is to conduct double blind tests. The unfortunate side effect is that some individuals are absolutely going to lose their lives so that others may live.
The FDA is acutely aware of the problem of denying treatments of unknown efficacy to terminal patients. They have expanded access rules (with more likely to come) to deal with this exact situation. They aren't blind to the problem but there are very good reasons why they are careful about creating exceptions to allow use of unproven treatments.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Even the safest drugs kill some people. There are complex side effects, interactions with other drugs and dosage issues. The question isn't will it kill someone, the question is how many people will it kill if it is shown to be more effective than placebo and is that number small enough to justify widespread use? There also is the question of whether a terminal cancer patient's life today is worth more than the multiple lives that might be saved by learning about a drug and how it affects the human body. These are serious, difficult questions and there is more at stake than one single life. You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
I'd agree with that in principle but there is more to the problem. I'm assuming you are relatively bright, interested in your health, and willing to accept risks. Not everyone fits that description. Many patients are not very bright and informed consent for them is a bit of wishful thinking. There is no way in hell my own mother would really understand the risks of even many basic medical treatments. She is however relatively susceptible to listening to people who sound like they know what they are talking about. The FDA isn't in the business of preventing *you* specifically from taking a drug - they are in the business of preventing snake oil salesmen. One only has to look at the "alternative medicine" industry to see that there is plenty of snake oil out there. The only tool we currently have to establish the efficacy of drugs is medical trials. If we just throw those out every time because we found a hint that a new drug might work in a mouse model, then we have ground medical science to a halt.
Yes, the FDA policies cost lives for the sake of knowledge. Snake oil salesmen if left unchecked would cost more.
I mean if the side effects are really as non-existant as it sounds in the article(but it probably isn't.) that makes me wonder about something. Could pretty much every healthy adult just take this medicine daily? Seriously, if there was a pill that you could take every morning and the end result of taking it was you can't get cancer and it had minimal side effects I think alot of people would take that as a preventative. (Even if the medicine was 5-10 dollars a day. I know I would if there was something like that and it had been tested thoroughly.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ideally, Drug companies would love it if they can make Cancer manageable instead of curing. Look at Diabetes.... its manageable.... meaning the patient spends thousands to stay alive but never gets cured.
Where is the profit in a cure.
A joke comes to mind,
Back when trades were handed from Father to Son; A son proudly proclaims to his dad, "Dad I cured the wonman who had been coming to you for 20 years and yet you couldn't cure her". Dad replies, "You fool, she was our only faithful customer".
Hate to be a buzzkill, but I've cured cancer in mice dozens of times with experimental agents.
None of those agents have ever cured cancer in humans. Most of them have done nothing in clinical trials. Survival rates for lung cancer, for example, haven't changed since the 1960s.
The lack of new cancer drugs has gotten so bad that some drug companies want to move the goalpost. Instead of objective goals like increased survival, the increase in more subjective things like "quality of life" is touted as the benefit of the drug.