Free-Hand Cancer Spending - Any Results?

[suzy_q2010]

Originally Posted by saibot

If it's the thread I'm thinking about, it wasn't closed. It was just moved to the Cancer forum.

Apparently some people think that if cancer is detected early and successfully treated, that doesn't count as a "cure." Apparently it only counts if it spreads throughout your whole body and is THEN cured. Yeah, we haven't reached the point where we can do that very well yet. But that all the people who were treated before they were terminal don't count, boggles my mind.

We're getting there:

https://www.newscientist.com/article...new-treatment/

"Judy Perkins, from Florida, had breast cancer that had spread to other organs, despite trying seven other cancer treatments. “She had tennis ball-sized lesions throughout her liver, says Steven Rosenberg at the National Institutes of Health, Maryland. “It probably would have killed her in the next two to three months.”

But Rosenberg and colleagues tried a new method for boosting the immune system to treat her cancer, and six weeks later, Perkin’s tumours had halved in size. A year later, they had disappeared. Two and a half years on from treatment, she remains healthy."

[jbgusa]

Originally Posted by suzy_q2010

We're getting there:
**********

But Rosenberg and colleagues tried a new method for boosting the immune system to treat her cancer, and six weeks later, Perkin’s tumours had halved in size. A year later, they had disappeared. Two and a half years on from treatment, she remains healthy."

I love happy-ending stories. However an individual life does not have an infinite value. What was the R&D costs, including overhead, for that research? And on the other side, how many other people did it save?

[saibot]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

I love happy-ending stories. However an individual life does not have an infinite value. What was the R&D costs, including overhead, for that research? And on the other side, how many other people did it save?

I love those stories, too. And while saving even one person is worthwhile, surely the goal of the research is to cure many other people with later-stage cancers by using similar treatment.

...Wait, I thought you were the one complaining about no progress having been made to save people with advanced tumors. And now you're complaining that the research to do so, even when it proves successful, is too expensive? How can we make progress without spending money on research?

[Chint]

Originally Posted by jbgusa

In 1971 Richard Nixon opened the floodgates to funding cancer research, seeking a cure for cancer. I was heartened since my family lived under the shadow of my father having had a rectal resection and colostomy.

Having lost my father to cancer in 1972, see When Should a Parent Tell Their Offspring That Other Parent is Fatally Ill?, and being about to lose a close friend's wife to cancer within days, I feel as if much cancer funding is simply providing a livelihood to professional students. Obviously there is progress with lymphomas, including Hodgkin's, and leukemias. But I think that for solid body tumors people are getting, at best, a year or two of time in which cancer defines their life. In other words, continuous chemo, and living for the short "good period" between chemo rounds.

This does not count for progress.

There's progress in a lot more than just lymphomas and leukemias. But do you really expect cancers, which have different time courses, etiologies, causes, progressions, susceptibilities etc to be equally universally cured? That's sorta childish nonsense.


Apart from immunotherapies/CAR-Ts/targeted therapies, combo chemos, targeted radio, identification (and hence avoidance of) cancer risks, public noncooperation (ie obesity rates, exercise rates), epidemiological understanding, and about a hundred other factors, what is your armchair judgment on the millions of people who have made huge advances in understanding cancers causes, progressions, differences, categorizing them & stratifying them (yes its not just "cancer", its not even just "breast cancer" - now that can be stratified, and staged, and treatment specified). Have you any idea how many years of late nights, weekends and sacrifice it takes to get a single scientific paper out? Even then, one is not sufficient - others need to duplicate and confirm? Oh yes, all those highly paid post-docs you must be talking about.


You've got a diagnosis today, which hospital are you going to walk into? The 1971 one? There are, still, thousands of such types of hospitals in all parts of the world if you want to use them. So from your chair on high arbiter as to what is and what is not progress, tell me with a straight face you'd be just as happy to walk into the 1971 one. You know, since you said there was no progress.


You know what has progressed, despite the massive increase in availability of knowledge, instruction and understanding since 1971? The prevalence of stupidity in the general population. That's made big gains.