

Killing Cancer - us0r
http://killingcancer.vice.com/

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melling
We spend billions (tens of billions?) on cancer research in the US every year.
Unfortunately, it seems that not all of the money is spent effectively:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/small-amount-of-money-from-
pi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/small-amount-of-money-from-pink-nfl-
merchandise-goes-to-breast-cancer-research-2013-10)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-stordahl/breast-
cancer-p...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-stordahl/breast-cancer-pink-
ribbons_b_1951319.html)

Does anyone know the best places to donate?

~~~
reasonattlm
If you like ambitious, disruptive approaches then you could donate to the SENS
Research Foundation in support of the research strategy known as whole-body
interdiction of lengthening of telomeres (WILT) [1]. People who follow cancer
research lament that all cancers are different, and that there are few
biochemical commonalities. This is what makes cancer expensive: even with the
next generation of fairly general targeted cell killing therapies that
disconnect (a) the kill mechanism from (b) the delivery mechanism and (c) the
targeting mechanism you have to build and prove new targeting mechanisms for
every subtype of cancer. Slow going, and this is by no means fully realized as
a technology base at this point.

But all cancers do in fact have a commonality, just one you have to be
ambitious to target: they must lengthen their telomeres, either through abuse
of telomerase or the less well understood alternative lengthening of telomeres
process. If you can shut off these few mechanisms for a sufficiently long
period of time then any cancer dies. Doing this temporarily seems plausible.
Doing it permanently would mean you never get cancer, but you'd also need all
of your stem cell populations replaced every decade at least, or you'd suffer
some form of accelerated-aging like condition due to absence tissue
maintenance, which is a whole other situation of complexity that lies
somewhere in the future. One by one it's pretty plausible to replace stem cell
populations, and indeed technically possible today for some of the better
understood stem cell populations such as those of the immune system, but there
are a lot of them to do. A lot.

So if you want to help the development of the ultimate cure for cancer - some
form of interdiction of telomere lengthening - then send a large donation to
the SENS Research Foundation and earmark it for that line of research. You can
look at their annual reports to see where they are in this research.

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research/cance...](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research/cancerous-cells)

