

The Prospect of Cancer Does Not Worry Me - MikeCapone
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/01/the-prospect-of-cancer-does-not-worry-me.php

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karzeem
I once heard someone say that curing cancer is like curing infectious disease;
it's an entire class of problems that requires a variety of tools.

In the past couple decades, there are particular cancers that have gone from
being uniformly deadly to being usually survivable, or at least much more
survivable. Others have remained unsolved. But the point is that even once we
make giant leaps, how you get treated and what your outcome looks like is
going to vary a lot from cancer to cancer.

~~~
houseabsolute
Maybe. There are some technologies that if discovered could probably be
effective against any type of cancer. But it's not clear that those will be
developed in the next few decades, or whether it will take longer.

------
abalashov
While I am glad the author has liberated himself from the emotional distress
of cancer through blind optimism, he has shown himself to be a blithering
ignoramus in matters oncological.

I certainly hope that his prognostications for 2030 carry a hint of truth, but
they seem to suggest that one type of neoplasm in a single body of tissue is
like another - e.g. all brain tumours are magically alike, treatable by the
same means! Nothing could be further from the truth. It is difficult to
suppose that the treatment of such a thing is going to be a mere outpatient
clinical procedure with a high success rate and few side effects.

It is precisely because cancers are a broad category of runaway cellular
processes (united only by their invasiveness and lack of negative feedback
into the growth process) that are highly distinct in every which way that the
concept of a "cure" for "cancer" as such is an absurd one to anyone who has
the slightest clue about how cancers operate.

It does seem that targeted therapy is the most successful avenue to pursue,
but I don't think the author has any idea of the sheer amount of even the most
common and relatively simple "targets." I think he's imagining that there are
a dozen, maybe two; liver cancer is cured one way, brain cancer another way,
retinal blastomas another way, prostate cancer yet another way... that's just
not how it works. Each one of those corpuses of tissue can develop many kinds
of tumours, and some of them can develop practically innumerable kinds.

But hey, far it be from me to rain on anybody's parade - I'm not an
oncologist, and have no life sciences background. Let's hope I'm wrong viz. my
opening sentence and that I'm just a pretentious, know-it-all twit, and that
he's right.

~~~
reasonattlm
No suggestion was made that all forms of cancer are the same. But to the best
of my knowledge, all cancers have distinctive cancer cell surface chemistry -
which may vary somewhat between individual genotypes, but is generally similar
for clades of cancers between individuals. In the targeted paradigm, cancer
research is a matter of identifying that chemistry, and then programming your
hunter-killers to that scent.

These two jobs - (a) take an individual's cancer biopsy and identify its
signature, or match it to an established library of signatures and (b)
construct a homing mechanism for that signature - are core competencies for
today's cutting edge biotechnology.

There are many, many examples from the past few years of researchers doing
exactly what you scoff at in the laboratory, for specific cancers in
laboratory animals.

In summary: one technology platform, many different implementations, a large
library of cancer signatures built from the results of individual therapies.

------
xtho
> But in 2030, your status would place you at the head of the line for a
> clinical appointment

This story is being told since the beginning of modern medicine.
Unfortunately, that magical moment always is 20 years in the future.

