Personal Finance Topics / Macroeconomic Trends and Risks
No. of Recommendations: 2
No. of Recommendations: 0
This is an exciting advance, speaking as a double breast cancer survivor.
It will take a lot more work and large, controlled clinical trials to prove that it works. There have been many breast cancer therapies that failed after a hopeful beginning.
They are right to shift to pancreatic cancer which doesn't have the deep portfolio of effective treatments that have been developed over decades for breast cancer.
Wendy
No. of Recommendations: 0
They are right to shift to pancreatic cancer
It (pancreatic cancer) is far more high profile than anything else.
However, I looked at the underlying concept as a means to attack each specific cancer in a way the cancer cells differ from normal cells. Given your background, you likely have a good idea about the chemistry involved.
No. of Recommendations: 1
Better living through Chemistry. Love it. This was hard to understand though: "Before moving into human trials, the researchers plan to test the treatment in additional cancer types, including aggressive pancreatic cancer, to determine whether the approach can be effective across a wide range of tumors." Why not start a very need human trial in breast cancer patients while also continuing to look at the other cancers in mice? The current climate in gov't funding of science?
IP,
who has seen the toll breast cancer takes on some of her loved ones
No. of Recommendations: 4
InParadise wrote: "Why not start a very need human trial in breast cancer patients while also continuing to look at the other cancers in mice? The current climate in gov't funding of science?"
Breast cancer trials are very expensive. Partly because of the cost of the drug. Partly because of the cost of following the patients for a long time because breast cancer can recur years later.
It would be hard to recruit for a controlled trial. Who would volunteer to take the chance of getting a control (no drug at all) when there are so many effective treatments? Even if the "control" was comparison with an established treatment I wouldn't agree to use a new, unproven drug.
On the other hand, pancreatic cancer has no effective treatments. It's fast-moving which would give rapid results. Patients would readily volunteer since the alternative is certain death.
This makes more sense to me.
Wendy
No. of Recommendations: 0
Why not start a very need human trial in breast cancer patients while also continuing to look at the other cancers in mice?
Most likely, they are not yet ready for it.
Making the drug, trained doctors and staff, then seeing if it needs to be modified for use in humans, for other cancers, and so on.
Mouse trials are a LONG way from human trials. If the first human trials are anywhere near as successful, then the drug could be moved to the top of the list for rapid approval.
