I too am a cancer survivor. I had surgery and radiation afterwards and I'm alive right now. One thing that scares the hell out of me is finding out that the radiation I had initially could very well give me another kind of leukemia anywhere from 9+ years after having it. It's been 9 years now and that thought is always at the back of my mind.
It has been 17 years for me.
There are ALWAYS new clinical trials going on and yet here we are, decades later and a 'cure' always seems to be 'right around the corner'-----kinda like the New System---but never materializing.
I've already mentioned that there is no such thing as a single cancer cure, there are many different kinds of cancer. Some cancers have high cure rates with current marketed technology, and some do not.
Billions of dollars have been used for research and while we sometimes hear about a 'promising treatment'---it suddenly vanishes and you never hear a damn thing about it again.
I don't know where you are getting your news from, but some ideas that show early stage promise do not pan out in humans in the real world. It could be that they do not improve response rates, or that the risk/benefit profile is not sufficiently favorable to recommend their use.
. Or, you just keep hearing about how 'further testing is needed' before being able to submit it through the bureaucratic bullshit that is the FDA.
Agreed. The regulatory regime means that hundreds of millions of dollars must be spent and many years must pass before a therapy can be put into commercial use. This slows down the process greatly.
Good example is a wonderfully promising technique invented by an engineer by the name of John Kanzius in 2005, using radio waves to eliminate most cancers from the body (Kanzius himself had leukemia).
Kanzius isn't the only researcher working on gold nanoparticles. However, to my knowledge, no one is performing clinical trials using this method at this time. It may be that the method needs more refinement and/or validation in animal models before being tested in humans. Has Kanzius filed an Investigational New Drug application with the FDA? I don't think so. He may still be collecting data in order to do it. I write about biotech for a living, and cover many emerging cancer techs, but I haven't been following his story closely.
I think stem cell therapy and super-charging our our immune cells would prove the most promising treatment.
Stem cell derived immune system cancer therapies in clinical trials (I know the man who founded this company).
http://www.geron.com/GRNOPC1Trial/
http://www.geron.com/products/productinformation/spinalcordinjury.aspx
There are certainly some drugs out there have saved lives, but sometimes the side effects are so bad, people stop taking them. Cryotherapy for cancer is another treatment that you rarely hear anything about, but it seems to have a pretty good success rate.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Therapy/cryosurgery
It is being investigated, and is not yet at the stage where it can be run through clinical trials.
These things take YEARS to run through clinical trials. They also take a LOT OF MONEY to perform. Let's say you are a researcher and have invented and patented a promising new technique. You have to found a company, hire people, and find millions of dollars from angel investors to get you off the ground. Your small company will not be able to earn a dime until you can get final approval. This could easily take a decade. In the meantime, you have to keep raising funds in order to keep the research and trials going (since you have no sales). This is very, very expensive, and there is no guarantee that someone will not come up with something better in the meantime.
The FDA sets an extremely high bar. There are politics and personalities involved. It is a huge barrier to entry for those that are innovating new therapies. In the meantime, millions of people have died over the decades from a great variety of diseases because of our regulatory regime. You are preaching to the choir, Mary.
http://www.isil.org/resources/lit/death-regulation.html
I know some might not agree, but to me, after 60 years of research and billions of dollars donated, the return on the investment has been pretty low....
Actually, there have been huge advances. Your odds of surviving are far higher today than they were 20 years ago, let alone 60.
in the meantime, Big Pharma continues to rake in billions each year for the same treatment they've been using for decades: chemotherapy and radiation.
Most chemo agents are in generic status these days. The big money makers for big pharma these days are drugs like Avastin, Herceptin, and Glivec, none of which are classical chemo drugs (the first two are monoclonal antibodies, the last one is a small molecule kinase inhibitor).
Since this subject interests you, shoot me a PM for info on what is going on these days.
