Yeah... I've got a Masters in pharmacology doing cancer research / drug development. One thing that I learned in grad. school is that we (humans) have "cured" cancers in lab animals hundreds of times, but that doesn't always mean that it will translate to an effective treatment in humans. eSineM was close in their description of cancer; basically any unregulated growth / reproduction of cells is considered to be a cancer (I just disagree that they call it cancer when "it cant be explained and its creating tumors etc." because there are many cancers that can very well be explained; it just may be that there isn't an effective treatment against the cancer, or that the cure is worse than the disease). But the ways that the cancer occurs is very diverse. Some cancers respond to growth hormones abnormally, like overproducing growth hormone receptors. Others don't respond to negative growth factors, flushing them out of the cells too quickly, or not having enough receptor on the cell membrane so that none enter the cell. Or they may just growth on their own without any cues from hormones.
When we talk about breast vs. colon cancer, we are only talking about the location in the body where the cancer occurs, not how the cancer is actually caused. Thus there are many different kinds of breast cancer, for example, each with a different way for the growth to occur. That is why some drugs are quite responsive with some breast cancer cases, but other cases won't respond at all.
Because all of the different types of cancers, it is very difficult to have any one drug target all cancers. Thus, this articles makes me very skeptical about the true efficacy of the drug. I'm not saying that it won't be effective in some cancers, just that it probably won't be a cure-all for all cancers. I also wonder what the "liquefying" is actually doing, and how it can distinguish between cancers and normal human tissues. If it only targets those cells that were actually exposed to the drug, then that may be why the article listed skin and colon cancers -- those being easy to target -- instead brain cancer, which would require extreme care to ensure that the doctor doesn't accidentally liquefy the patient's brain!
Because of the diversity in cancers, some of the more promising ways to truly treat many different cancers is not by trying to target the cancers themselves, but rather other cells in the body that the cancer needs in order to grow. For example, cancer tumors require blood vessels in order to get food, get rid of toxins, and to spread around the body (metastasize). So by targeting the newly formed blood vessels, it causes the tumors to "starve to death" regardless of how the cancers actually grows out of control. See this article which is only a year old that describes this type of treatment as well as the drugs that are just starting to come out on the market:
http://www.cancer.org/docroot/eto/content/eto_1_4x_the_details_how_antiangiogenesis_drugs_work.aspThe OP's article reminds me of another cancer "cure" that was found in nature; taxol which was discovered from the bark of the Pacific Yew tree (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paclitaxel#History). Notice how long it took from initial identification and isolation of the drug to the time that it finally came out onto the market! Thus when the OP's article mentions that it'll be 7 years before human clinical trials, it doesn't really surprise me. This also points out why chemotherapies are so expensive; although the drug itself may cost only a few dollars to make, the cost for all of the research time by PhDs and MDs is enormous. Esp. when you consider that less than 5% of the potential substances actually make it out to the market. Thus I don't begrudge "Big Drug" companies from trying to make a profit on those drugs that actually do work, esp. the few years that they have exclusive rights on the patent.
Community Forum
Topic: Possible CURE FOR CANCER (Read 5925 times)
September 21, 2009, 11:32:53 am
