Maybe we have... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9191848/Univ...
it's hype. Read the blog post!
Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
81–90 of 167 posts
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#82The National Cancer Institute's average yearly budget for cancer research is around $4.9 billion. NFL football revenue? $9 billion. Priorities.
apples and oranges comparison. PRIVATE investment is much higher than public funding - just as PBS can't outspend NBC
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#83We haven't cured a lot of things. Well, we've cured lots of small things, but few of the doozies. A baldness cure has been ten years away for the last thirty years. No cure for blindness, AIDS, lost limbs. Remember the blue denim dye that killed cancer? What happened to it? If something is "ten years away", it means we simply don't know how to do it, we are just hoping for someone else to come up with the tech to sol…
Most of the big things we cured where diseases that no-longer seem to be a big deal because they where cured. Food born illness, measles, and smallpox are all things that have killed more people than AIDS and are no longer a problem in the western world.
Measles what's that? If vaccinations were stopped, each year about 2.7 million measles deaths worldwide could be expected. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm
And "Smallpox is believed to have emerged in human populations about 10,000 BC... Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox We are talking about something that killed around A BILLION PEOPLE and now it's 'gone'.
At it's current rate AIDS might catch up to Smallpox 200-600 years from now. But, that's just deaths the side effects where far more common. She might not be dead but I don't like seeing this picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Child_with_Smallpox_Bangla...
PS: You say there is no cure for blindness, but smallpox was responsible for 1/3 of all blindness cases which just don't happen any more.
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#84What I got from this: - Cancer is complex, its profile is not that of 1 disease but many hundreds of diseases - Sequencing Cancers and attempting to find a match to suggest a treatment will not work, each cancer is unique and itself made up of a diverse population - Cancer is mutiny combined with the greed of evil dictators. A bunch of cells give up the chain of command and start co-opting resources to feed their opu…
>- Sequencing Cancers and attempting to find a match to suggest a treatment will not work, each cancer is unique and itself made up of a diverse population
It seems to me that sequencing is a must, rather than a "not work," as without that type of intelligence one can't even know what you're up against. You just need to take into account the diversity of mutations, and not assume that you've seen everything that's currently in the population.
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#85See also: "Facebook acquires Instagram [for $1B]"
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
All this genetic diversity seems daunting at first but I think it is also indicative of something that gives me great hope. Cancer isn't like a virus or pathogen that has evolved to avoid it our immune systems and treatments as it passes from individual. It is a degenerative state of the same system that produces healthy cells and fertile humans. It is genetically very diverse. Part of this is because cancers cells o…
Well, "Cancer isn't like a virus or pathogen that has evolved to avoid it our immune system..." until it start reproducing at a quick rate -then, as the article says "Tumor cells undergo evolution as they grow, so that the cells in them are genetically heterogeneous.". But another thing to think about is that science based medicine has so far been more or less powerless against degenerative diseases - in general. Our…
Evolution does occur in cancer cells in the sense of increased genetic variability which may lead to more aggressive/resistant cancer in a patient. However we won't see things like drug resistant staph infection because the genetics of the tumor don't spread beyond the individual.
I also agree that our understanding of degenerative diseases is poor but I think that modern technology and methods will change this. Hopefully to the point were we can prompt the body to move the body from a diseased to a healthy state but that may be a ways out.
However the genetic diversity in cancerous cells is not present in functioning human beings. Based on the analysis of genetic sequence data from tumor and blood samples from the same individuals it is clear that a large amount of mutation and structural variation occurs in cancer cells.
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#87If p53 is so critical that many cancers disable it, couldn't we genetically replicate it in our genome many times, to make it far harder for cancer to disable?
Why didn't this happen naturally, by evolutionary processes?
Is it because all copies of p53 can be disabled simultaneously via RNAi? If so, maybe particular disablers of p53 can be targeted too?
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#88Given the article talks about decades-long lead times before a cancer metastasizes, I hope that more attention begins to be focused on much earlier-stage detection and treatment. I think a lot of the problem is, by the time a cancer has metastasized and one begins showing symptoms, it's already very late in the game to try and fix things.
From the article:
Moreover, as was discussed in at least a couple of talks at the AACR meeting, an evolution-based analysis of tumors using the latest NGS techniques indicates that for most solid tumors the time from founder mutation to clinically apparent metastasis is between 20 and 30 years. For example, for pancreatic cancer it’s a median of around 21 years, and for colon cancer it’s around 30 years.
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#89If p53 is so critical that many cancers disable it, couldn't we genetically replicate it in our genome many times, to make it far harder for cancer to disable? Why didn't this happen naturally, by evolutionary processes? Is it because all copies of p53 can be disabled simultaneously via RNAi? If so, maybe particular disablers of p53 can be targeted too?
p53 operates as a tetramer (4 individual p53 [monomeric] proteins come together to form the active protein complex), and can have a dominant negative effect if one of the two p53 genes are mutated. This basically means we have two copies of the gene, but if one is mutated and you form a tetramer and 1 or more of the tetramer's monomers are mutants then that tetramer is far less active. Even if you had lots of copies of p53, its effect could still be down-regulated by a single mutant.
There's been some work to try and reactivate p53 where it's been knocked out, although I'm not sure how successful it's been. http://www.ejcancer.info/article/S0959-8049(03)00454-4/abstr...
Re: Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
#90... Because PhD's can barely feed themselves. ... Because the "smart" people work on Wall Street/for consulting firms. ... Because Facebook acquired Instagram.
... Because (the US at least) spends way too much money on war instead of curing disease, becoming energy independent, and educating our next generation.