[SaltwaterServr]

Originally Posted by Eskimo

Just a couple of points in this thread.

The first thing you have to realize is that animal physiology and human physiology is very different. In particular, the organization of dog and cat spinal cords to human spinal cords is very different so that which works in dogs and cats often will not work at all in humans. The same is true of rat brains and human brains so that which seems to work in rat brains often won't work in a human brain.

[View Full Quote]The second thing is that I never cease to be amazed by the general public's willingness to believe that the best mind's available in business would pass up trying to monetize cures for conditions like breast cancer and lung cancer. Sure, you could give them a bunch of cheap and off-patent chemotherapies that have been around for a long time and don't earn much money or you could have a patented "monopoly" on the cure for breast cancer for the next 15 years. You could say maybe someone else could earn more money off something that can be sold over and over and over. That may be true but that guy's treatment will be worthless the moment the "cure" hits the market.

Anyhow, cancer is a very common disease so it is not surprising it has taken so long to get an understanding of how it works and what things we can do to try and stop it. One thing you have to realize is that there are probably all kinds of pre-cancerous cells in your body right now. The question is why don't they all develop into cancers, how can you stop them from becoming cancer, how can you detect them before they cause disease and how can you treat them before they cause serious harm. While we often like to think of cancer as a "disease" it is really a bunch of many different types of diseases that behave like cancers do - reproduce like crazy and ignore the body's rules on which tissues go where.

Anyhow, major advances have been made. We can now go ahead and figure out someone's genome within a day for around $1000 whereas a decade ago it took several teams more than a decade to do just one human. What has emerged is an understanding of how complicated the gene machinery is - how it moves and how it sleeps and wakes up versus just how it looks. Now what we have to try and understand is how does one person's genome interact with its environment to create disease. This is an immensely complex construct so it is not surprising that we have only picked out the simplest of such diseases thus far because it is complicated at a level that few of us can even comprehend.

One of the next set of advances will also start to come from the ability to build designer drugs to treat certain conditions. As we get a better understanding of how biological molecules work we have also started to understand how we can build drugs to interfere in diseases. Anti-TNF alpha blocking medications have made a huge difference in the treatment of conditions like ankylosing spondylitis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Another huge change will be coming in cancer therapy. It will be about medications used to tweak the immune system to treat cancer. There is already one medication out to treat prostate cancer. There is another with amazing results being tested for a dangerous kind of brain cancer (glioblastoma multiforme) and there is another being used in some forms of breast cancer. These aren't pie in the sky things either - they may be available in 3 years or so to the general public. There is also potential to use viruses to treat a certain type of cancer that uses a certain genetic pathway that is utilized by about 7 of 10 of the most common cancers.

So major advances continue to be made but everyone wants it all right now. Part of it is researchers, often well-meaning researchers, think they are much closer to the "cure" than they really are. There are a lot of mis-steps along the way. But no one is really hiding cures from the public - they are just way too valuable and CEOs will figure out ways to monetize cures. That's what they are paid to do.

Thank you.

The "Canada Cured Cancer" cult never sleeps.