A Cure for Cancer?

[Gord_in_Toronto]

For various reasons I have been following cancer research very closely and have said to myself on numerous occasions recently, "THAT looks promising. I hope it leads somewhere".

Could this be it?

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/eb8457be-dad5-11e0-a58b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1XkHq0SpV

The Financial Times Ltd
September 12, 2011

New drug targets only cancer tumours

By Jonathan Wood

Scientists at the University of Bradford have created a “smart” cancer drug that is activated only when it reaches a tumour, reducing toxic side-effects elsewhere.

The drug uses a feature of solid tumours to trigger an attack on the blood vessels feeding the cancer.

In one study, tumour growth was halted in the mice for more than three weeks using a dose of the new drug combined with a dose of a standard chemotherapy drug – a likely scenario for how the drug, if approved, might be used in treating cancer.

In half the mice, the tumour shrank to a point where it could no longer be detected.

 

[dvictr]

for whatever reason.. i follow the news on this topic also, and it seems every week/month there is a new breakthrough, promising treatment..

my favorite was tick saliva.. never heard from it again

 

[jli]

It is not going to be the one cure of all cancers. And the researchers are also aware of this as one of them explains:

We are very optimistic about the opportunity for this as a new treatment to destroy tumour blood supply. But we are cautious as this has all been done in a lab setting. We now want to take it forward into the clinical setting,

There are a few things the journalist at The Financial Times got wrong. The study was not done on cancers but on cancer cell lines. Figure 1 in the article shows that the cell lines vary in their expression of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP). and there is also variation between the expression in the grafted (cell line derived) tumors and the (cell line) cultures. Cancers are not made of cell lines, so it is really not possible to deduce from effect on a cell culture/grafted cell line tumor to an effect on a cancer in a patient. But still it is an interesting concept.

It is also incorret that MMP's are not active in normal parts of the body. MMP's play important roles in the normal body (tissue remodelling, wound healing etc.). Even though the researchers didn't find significant amounts of the active metabolite in samples of blood and various tissues, we can´t say for sure that it is completely harmless in patients before clinical trials have been carried out.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Thanks for the knowledgeable response jli.

I usually try to find the original paper when I read something in the popular press but sometimes, even when I do, I do not have enough background to understand or evaluate it.

My general understanding of cancer research is that there is progress but it's not easy. I guess we all are waiting for a true breakthrough.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

One reason so many 'breakthroughs' are being reported is the progress of research has accelerated with genetic and molecular laboratory techniques. In the past there was a lot more trial and error to find treatments. More recently the research involves looking directly at the mechanics and genetics of tumor cells and designing treatments specifically then trying them.

But with these treatments, one cannot perfectly predict how they will affect other cells, and tumor cells evolve resistance in ways similar to microbes. Still progress is speeding up.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

One of the studies linked in the article shows the research was done using tumor cells as jli noted. It takes a while, sometimes a few years, to go from there to living mice and several more to go from mice to a commercial product one can use on humans and not all successes in mice lead to successes in treating humans.

 

[summand]

Personally, I feel very optimistic for the future (next 10 years), since there have been a lot of promising successes, e.g.:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/health/13gene.html?pagewanted=all
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/cancer-detection-circuit-0902.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21610701

Also, genome sequencing will soon be cheap enough to do it with basically every person on earth and that will have hopefully have huge impact on cancer and treatments: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution.html

Don't get me wrong, all those "breakthroughs" might be just bubbles. But each of them looks promising and there are so many of them...

 

[summand]

And another one:
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/133/4/983

This one tries to find a way to target tumour stem cells. Very early, but again, promising.