Sorry to sound skeptical, but back in the day cancer was killed twice a week on Digg.
We need more researchers in the world working on these problems that benefit us all. Thinly veiled mockery of their work and the progress they're making is really unsavory and possibly quite discouraging to someone who's thinking of going into this field.
Just be grateful that progress is being made; one day you may directly benefit from that experimental drug mentioned in the article.
In this case, it looks like the complaint is poorly founded. This is a real breakthrough working on people cancer (as opposed to mouse cancer).
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/04/05/so_you_thoug...
This is a review of a very interesting paper recently published. 50 women with breast cancer had their tumors sequenced. The result? 1700 distinct mutations and the most common three mutations only showed up in 10% of patients.
My personal belief is that cancer will never be "cured" in the literal sense of the word. Many cancers will become chronic conditions like AIDS where life expectancy is reduced, but people diagnosed will still get to enjoy a majority of the average life span.
There's a medical device that lets you test the response of the patient's biopsy to multiple drug combinations.
I wonder if scaling this by:creating huge libraries of cancer drugs that only passed animal safety trials, using this test device to find the most effective combination of large amounts of drugs(maybe even combine drugs that fit the genetic profile of the biopsy strains) and using the combination but carefully managing dosage not to create toxicity , could be useful and practical to fight those mutation rich cancers ?
- Cost of sequencing
- Toxicity of current drugs in combination
- lack of suitable drugs
- lack of patient trials
More on the last: This is on which everything depends. Medical ethics 'bends' a lot of allowances with regard to anti-cancer drugs because of the stakes but you can't just start introducing things willy-nilly. A new drug does not a cure make. And drugs have interactions, sometimes serious. Using one new drug may lead to some shift of the survival curve (or at least shrinkage of tumour, maybe it is now more susceptible to Surgery/Radiation or is just going to give them better quality of life) but adding additional drugs may reverse this trend if they are not properly researched All this requires money All this takes years But a surprising amount is already in progress. Sitting in on case conferences with practicing Oncologists and Radiologists, they have combinations of drugs with strange names 'R-CHOP' etc - have a wiki - to roll out against standards, are always reciting the latest literature, trying to get patients into new trials that show promise, all in the hope of continually shifting the survival curve further to the right
I'm sure 10-20 years from now, we'll have a collection of drugs that target specific mutations in cancer (the number is already getting large).
Doing it via a med device is actually not a terrible idea. You can at least screen for the mutations, but predicting how the drugs will act in the human body (especially in combination) is much tougher.
However, with many forms of cancer, there are very few options, so higher risk method of treatment are much more tolerable.