It was such a relief when I, a cancer suvivor (for the moment anyway), heard that the President had put VP Biden in charge of curing cancer. Didn't Nixon declare a "War on Cancer".? Parenthetically, I have about the same opinion of our current President as I have of Nixon ...
Anyway here's a Scientific American web article from yesterday on the issue of "curing" cancer. Excerpts below. It's a very good article - hit the link for all ten paragraphs.
On January 12 Pres. Barack Obama laid out an aspirational plan in his final State of the Union to “cure cancer.” He did not put forth a specific time line for this effort or the metrics that would measure success but did say that he was putting Vice Pres. Joe Biden in charge of “mission control.” And already, the White House released information about several meetings in the coming month that Biden will hold to get the ball rolling on the initiative.
Yet is such a goal truly achievable in the near future? Patients and doctors know all too well that cancer is not one disease and there is no singular cure for the complex group of disorders. Biden did help secure a $264-million cash infusion in the most recent government spending bill that will support cancer work at the National Cancer Institute, but the obstacles to attacking cancer effectively are more than just financial. “A cure is a long way off,” but the prospect for some specific cancers does look bright, says James Allison, chair of the Department of Immunology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. For his part, at least Allison was not surprised about the announcement last night, he says, because the vice president himself called him and other researchers within the past two months to talk about cancer research. And now, unlike even five years ago, a 10-year remission is realistic for cancers like melanoma, which seemingly were unbeatable.
These gains are largely thanks to historic breakthroughs in the past few years with a bevvy of methods to employ patients’ own immune systems, collectively known as immunotherapy. But still large obstacles remain when it comes to getting immunotherapy to work for many different types of tumors. Although some cancers—particularly those that are rife with mutations like lung cancer or melanoma—create more tangible targets on the surface of cells for the immune system to recognize and attack, other malignancies such as prostate and pancreatic cancers have proved more intransigent. As Scientific American reported earlier this year, more than half of the current cancer clinical trials do incorporate some form of immunotherapy but still oncologists are often only in the early stages of understanding how to use such treatment on a larger scale. Even with the cancers that are further along in their immunotherapy responses, a “certain fraction of those kinds of tumors, I don’t know we’ll ever cure,” Allison says.
It's a very good article - hit the link
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