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Originally Posted by cbarnett
what we really need is that cure for cancer that's supposed to be just around the corner....
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I think I speak with a
bit of authority on this, because my wife works as a Research Biologist at the largest pharma in the world (take one guess, starts with "P"), in the Cancer Discovery group.
They're close to a possible solution, but cancer is an affliction that affects the cellular level (i.e. down at the signalling and programming level of the cells, i.e. DNA). To "cure" cancer, you have to either inhibit the signalling that is telling the cells to multiply (incorrect signalling) or enhance the signalling, telling the cells when to die (apoptosis).
At a very basic level, cancer and alzheimers are polar opposites. In cancer, the cells are programmed to die at a certain life-stage, and ignore that signalling (hence causing new cells to grow underneath them, causing the "tumor" of undead cells commonly associated with cancers). In alzheimers, the cells die early, before they are programmed to (causing the signals between two neighbor cells to never reach each other, because the "man-in-the-middle" cell has died early).
It'll be a tough nut to crack, since there are so many hundreds of cancer strains, affecting all kinds of cells, organs, and organ systems, but they're very close to something that should prolong quality of life for those afflicted with it.
I, of course, am entirely opposed to the way corporate pharmaceutical companys approach these problems (it was part of the reason I resigned from the same pharma she still works for, after 5 years in "Emerging Technologies" [
land of the unlimited budget]). There are a LOT of diseases that these companies can provide long-lasting cures for,
actual cures, not temporary pill-for-life fixes, but they ignore them.. why? Because the disease only affects 5% of people or 10% of another people. Its not a broad enough audience for them to consider, for profit reasons. This includes simple things like Diabetes (they have treatments in academia using porcine [pig] islet cells to replace human islet cells), celiac (the gluten peptide has already been discovered, and [again, academia] has a compound which allows the gluten peptide to pass through the intestines, unimpeded). There are dozens of others, and each of those 5% adds up, but not to the bean-counters are big pharma companies.
Mark my words (archived here), we're going to see a lot more large pharmaceutical companies going directly into "licensing" compounds and pharmaceutical treatments from smaller biotechs and academia, and giving up their own R&D groups in favor of it. Its too costly to perform R&D and have so many compounds fail when they reach the human testing stage. Its easier to rely on the smaller companies to produce the R&D, and to just license what they produce. You spend 10 years and $200M to develop a compound that has a market shelf life of 2 years. This is why medicines cost $7/pill in some cases. They have to recoup the cost of the R&D process (and yes, it takes that long to bring a drug to market).
Cancer poses a very interesting biological problem to solve, but the technology is improving, and the speed of development is improving. Unfortunately, the number of people with inoperable, untreatable cancers, is also improving at an alarming rate.
10 years from now, if we still don't have a "cure", we're going to see a very large percentage of people developing cancers. We just don't have enough data to know if all of this Bluetooth, cordless, wifi, cellular radiation is doing any long-term damage to our brains and cellular makeup. Remember Ritalin? Thalidamide? Those were thought to be harmless, and decades later, they've realized the dangers.