As a cancer researcher who has an allergic reaction to popsci articles on cancer & CRISPR, the concepts in this article were presented extremely well.
I will say re: optimism that science for me is always both exciting in that there are always new questions, new answers and new possible treatment, but can also be very disappointing if you expect any one answer to be without very real and confining limitations.
The headline "Why [scientist] Has Become Optimistic about Curing Cancer" could have been written a million times about a million emerging or maturing field in cancer research (see: DNA repair, angiogensis, immunotherapy, onco-viruses).
We make progress everyday, but my brain usually goes to hibernate when somebody says they're "optimistic about curing cancer". If that time ever comes, I don't imagine it'll explode on the seen, but be a victory of iterations that creeps up on us.
I often think of how AIDS is now a treatable chronic illness instead of terminal one, and how that was a success that nearly goes unnoticed since treatments simply got incrementally better over time.
I'm naive to medical science so forgive me if I'm wrong.
Aren't there numerous famous examples of medical breakthroughs exploding into the scene? Penicillin and vaccines coming to mind. (at least I don't think those slowly crept up on us?)
I don't think a miracle cure is around the corner, but I can see why the layperson may feel like it's plausible, when you look at the miracle cures we have learned about growing up.
My perspective is that there are numerous awful diseases that we have sent into oblivion with medical science done by people with far fewer resources than our scientists have today.
They tend to be quickly forgotten. Thousands of schizophrenics were cured and released from asylums when antibiotics were discovered. Their mental health problems were rooted in having syphilis. Once cured of syphilis, they were no longer crazy either. Many people have not heard of this incident.
We prevented Y2K from becoming an Apocalypse. People now remember Y2K with derision, like "Those fools ever thought it was a threat. Ha!" When oil wells were set on fire as Saddam Hussein departed Kuwait, it was predicted they would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When it was resolved in six months, it was a footnote in stories with more human drama. It was not celebrated with the degree of fervor that the potential catastrophe was loudly decried.
People have a way of sweeping good news under the rug, forgetting it was ever a serious problem and finding something new to loudly bellyache about.
Haven't read the article, but it's bizarre that I _just_ read an article from the same publication (Nautilus) saying just the opposite, basically:
"But if all life, including cancer cells, continues to exploit niches, no solutions from technologists will be final.
Cancer cells are not simply a disorder or breakdown in a mechanism, but an organism going on a full-tilt offensive, using multiple, often shifting strategies to produce and use molecular fuel, win resources, and evade the immune system. If so, then the rules of the game may change—these insights suggest that the war on cancer may be endless. Still, we can get better at treating it as an evolving entity within the context on its ecology, through the idea of “living drugs,” such as engineering the body’s own immune cells to sense and mobilize an attack on cancer."
I'm not at all an expert in this field, but I don't find that argument from Nautilus compelling. Cancer in an individual results from a mutation of a healthy cell. It doesn't get spread from some other person who has cancer. Because of this, there is no mechanism for it to get better at fighting against modern medicine in a global sense. It might improve somewhat within the context of a single person, but this wouldn't pose a long term issue to developing medication that could eventually beat it with a high degree of certainty.
Some cancers are, in fact, spread from person to person. The HPV virus, for example, is responsible for many instances of cervical cancer - and I'm pretty sure it can cause throat and/or penile cancer as well. Not everyone that gets the virus gets cancer, but it is exceedingly common.
My understanding is that the virus increases the likelihood of contracting cancer because it suppresses the immune system, which is normally responsible for killing cancer cells. The cancer itself is still the result of a mutation in a healthy cell from the same person who has contracted it.
>an organism going on a full-tilt offensive, using multiple, often shifting strategies to produce and use molecular fuel, win resources, and evade the immune system
Speculation from a non-expert: maybe what is going on is ancient programs preserved in our dna from before multi-cellular life are getting activated, so the cell is treating the body as its competitive environment.
quoting the article:
> "But if all life, including cancer cells, continues to exploit niches, no solutions from technologists will be final.
It's plausible that we may eventually have such a good understanding of biological processes, and such powerful technology, that it'll be straightforwards for us to adapt treatments to new exploits.
Obviously no one can know for sure if this will or won't be possible, nor, if it will be possible, how far in the future it will be.
(Note: just because some technological ability seems really distant from our current capabilities does not make it valid to assume that it could only be something possible really distant in the future. We only need to look at the history of technology to see such assumptions can't be made).
The described strategies in this article are still a matter of working where the light is shining, not where it would be most effective. This is an age of genomics, genomics is popular and widely appreciated, and it is thus easy to raise funding for genomic work. Therefore people are trying to build personalized and per-cancer methods based on specific genes. The ability to raise funding for work is far more of a determinant of direction taken than expectation of quality of results, sadly.
So this is just an incremental update of the old strategy of trying to find a better chemotherapeutic for each cancer. It isn't going to work fast enough and well enough. There are not enough researchers and isn't enough funding to tackle every one of the hundreds of cancers and their subtypes in any reasonable about of time via the one project per cancer approach.
The only viable approach to a sweeping cure for cancer is to identify commonalities shared by very large fractions of all cancers. The chimeric antigen receptor strategies are a step in this direction, producing a technology base that has a much lower cost of adaptation to each new cancer in the class that they can target, rather than needing a whole new project from scratch. But is only a modest step.
The best way forward appears to me to be blockade of telomere extension: sabotaging telomerase [1] and alternative lengthening of telomeres [2], a small collection of mechanisms. If developed, it can be applied to all cancers, as all cancers depend absolutely on telomere lengthening. They can't evolve their way around it, as is the case for many existing methods of targeting particular mechanisms in a type of cancer. It is too fundamental a part of cellular biology. Blockade of telomere lengthening would be absolutely and determinedly the full stop at the end of all cancers - and would cost no more to develop than any one or two existing therapies that can treat only one subtype of cancer.
>There are not enough researchers and isn't enough funding to tackle every one of the hundreds of cancers and their subtypes in any reasonable about of time via the one project per cancer approach.
Its partly the way the problem is framed. Perhaps we wrongly assumed that cancer is one disease with a distinct root cause / cure purely based on similarities in symptoms. If so, talking of "curing cancer" is like "curing inflammation" - its much too general a symptom to cure, even though doctors are able to treat many cases of it by narrowing down the cause of inflammation, or treat it partially etc. Maybe cancer will be cured piecewise over the years rather than all at once, and people will laugh at how humanity thought there was a disease called cancer.
Agree. I think of cancer as the consequences of "bugs in our code". Saying we are going to cure cancer is on par with saying we are going to produce bug free software. That said having spent time around cancer hospitals, things have vastly improved over the last decade or so not just in survival rates, but quality of life post treatment.
I am told at work (I work in the cancer-medicine field but am no expert) that there are upwards of 1,000 distinct targeted cancer therapies in various stages of R&D at present. They could certainly (and likely will) make a big dent
I dont understand - melanoma (or any other type of cancer) would be explained just as it is currently explained by medicine (i am not an expert), i am only saying its possible that the cause of melanoma is different enough from the cause of lung cancer that they might not deserve to be grouped under the same name. In which case, we would not expect a single cure to be effective for both.
I have no idea, im not a doctor. Based on pop-sci articles, i think the idea is that a cell mutates to have DNA that makes it harmful to you. But this cell is part of your body, so it gets nutrients from the body and divides like any other cell, propagating its harmful DNA.
Watson was also the second person to have his fully sequenced genome published (after Venter). At the time it was very expensive. And perhaps dangerous since few knew what all that meant.
The most interesting fact about his genome that he had twenty genetic defects for disease that had not expressed themselves for unknown reasons. This helped lead to a moratorium on public genetic disease diagnosis from places like 23andMe, just lifted last week. Because you cant really tell the client they will get sick or not for many of the defects.
I think people should have the right to the information anyway. I mean we all dies one day and banning information on the likely ways doesn't seem to achieve much.
James Watson has also been disgraced in the academic world and removed from his academic positions for his views on women and people of color. His views are offensive, but also not backed by solid science.
Given his heterodox and inaccurate views, I'm not much interested in his views on other topics, nor convinced his opinion should hold much weight.
Luckily the rest of the article is just a survey of research having nothing to do with Watson.
Being on a moral high ground is not interesting or scientific. Even Evolutionist views are offensive to a subset of humanity. Racial targeted medicine is offensive to a subset of humanity.
James Watson is a crank who made his reputation by stealing data and then being an ass for the rest of his life. I'm not going to bother to read because the chances of him having anything useful to say is essentially zero.
I will say re: optimism that science for me is always both exciting in that there are always new questions, new answers and new possible treatment, but can also be very disappointing if you expect any one answer to be without very real and confining limitations.
The headline "Why [scientist] Has Become Optimistic about Curing Cancer" could have been written a million times about a million emerging or maturing field in cancer research (see: DNA repair, angiogensis, immunotherapy, onco-viruses).
We make progress everyday, but my brain usually goes to hibernate when somebody says they're "optimistic about curing cancer". If that time ever comes, I don't imagine it'll explode on the seen, but be a victory of iterations that creeps up on us.
I often think of how AIDS is now a treatable chronic illness instead of terminal one, and how that was a success that nearly goes unnoticed since treatments simply got incrementally better over time.