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If We Can't Kill Cancer, Can We Control It?

Posted by Soulskill on from the thus-began-the-era-of-the-slave-tumors dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The New Yorker: In April, [Dr. Eytan Stein] presented his findings to a packed auditorium at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in San Diego. It was the first public airing of the results of AG-221; patients with progressive [acute myelogenous leukemia] had never improved so quickly and definitively. ... The breakthrough is notable in part for the unconventional manner in which the drug attacks its target. There are many kinds of cancer, but treatments have typically combated them in one way only: by attempting to destroy the cancerous cells. Surgery aims to remove the entire growth from the body; chemotherapy drugs are toxic to the cancer cells; radiation generates toxic molecules that break up the cancer cells' DNA and proteins, causing their demise. A more recent approach, immunotherapy, co-opts the body's immune system into attacking and eradicating the tumor. The Agios drug, instead of killing the leukemic cells — immature blood cells gone haywire — coaxes them into maturing into functioning blood cells. Cancerous cells traditionally have been viewed as a lost cause, fit only for destruction. The emerging research on A.M.L. suggests that at least some cancer cells might be redeemable: they still carry their original programming and can be pressed back onto a pathway to health.

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. My wife just died of cancer this week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My wife just died of breast cancer this week -- she did not live to be 40 -- so articles and research like this give me hope that, when our child grows up, cancer will not be something that takes people's lives away from them so quickly and so young. This is a site for geeks, so I am sure a lot of people know about the brilliant nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and how his wife Arline Greenbaum died of tuberculosis in the 1940s.

    Today of course, tuberculosis is no longer a death sentence the way it was in the mid-20th century, and I think, well before end of this century, cancer will no longer become a death sentence either.

    1. Re:My wife just died of cancer this week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Somewhat ironically, we finally seem to be making progress in the fight against cancer at the same time we are losing the fight against bacteria. Take tuberculosis, for example, there are only a few drugs left that work. In fact, the fda just approved a drug bedaquiline that would have failed its clinical trial had it been practically any other kind of drug. You see, people who were taking it were dying at an alarming rate. It was approved because we don't have any other weapons against multi-drug resistant TB.

      In 2013 in the US more people died of antibiotic resistant bacteria than died of AIDS.

    2. Re:My wife just died of cancer this week by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In a sense this is a self-regulating problem. If a LOT of people start dying from bacterial infections you'll see new antibiotics developed. The problem today is that there isn't much public funding for antibiotics, and there isn't much demand for new ones. Sure, the few who need them REALLY need them, but stuff like MRSA is still fairly rare. Nobody wants to pay $100k for a 10-day supply of antibiotics.

      The problem is that developing a new antibiotic costs around $100M or so. (Well, it would be more accurate to say that the new antibiotic would cost $10-20M, but to find it you'd have to spend $80M on a bunch of other antibiotics that don't work out.) Whether you believe in patents or not, SOMEBODY has to spend that money if we want a new antibiotic. The market just doesn't exist for that kind of expenditure, so you won't see private companies doing it until the market grows (ie, more people start dying). Governments don't seem to care much about the issue either - any of the first world nations could easily fund this research but they all want somebody else to do it for them so that they can just do compulsory licensing of the resulting products and get them for cheap (well, the US won't do this since they're in bed with Pharma, but they're busy bombing people in Iraq). Tragedy of the commons...

  2. Re:Baking Soda May Help! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Please don't diffuse complete nonsense. The pH of the body is regulated within very strict limits, generally 7.35-7.45, and a therapeutic window ie a dose of drug X, in occurrence any alkaline agent, that does not kill the patient while killing the disease does not exist. You either don't kill any cancer cells or die with them by taking too much soda.

    It would be extremely easy for any individual researcher to publish this research and become instantly famous. Hell, I could do it tomorrow since I am an oncologist and treat patients with cancer for a living. The problem is that it doesn't work.

    Two weeks ago I saw a poor lady who was "treated" with soda infusions. Of course the disease spread and, in addition, she suffered a stroke because of the way the treatment was delivered (via intra-arterial catheter!). It's such a pity that patients, in their considerable emotional distress, actually believe that kind of stuff.

    PS: Posting anonymously because the incident with the intra-arterial soda infusions got some legal attention.