Scientists cure cancer but no one takes notice

Calboner

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Fact's that know little about, sonny you knw half of it. I been around a little longer you and seen a lot of things. And when I think
of the countless millions spent will little return I have resevations toward
the drug industry in itself.

Fact is, SONNY, that I watched my closest friend die of glioblastoma multiforme last year; and that with the help of another friend who works in biotechnology and has contacts among some of the leading researchers on that cancer in the US, moved heaven and earth to get access to an experimental treatment for him; but the access came too late for him to benefit from it. I know a thing or two about cancer, both from experience and from research, and you are a fucking asshole to presume otherwise.

The fact that people have died and continue to die of cancer is proof of the deadly power of cancer. Your idea that the medical profession can cure it but CHOOSES NOT TO is petulant infantile fantasy.

Big Red, I'll try to reply to your post tomorrow.
 

parr

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Fact is, SONNY, that I watched my closest friend die of glioblastoma multiforme last year; and that with the help of another friend who works in biotechnology and has contacts among some of the leading researchers on that cancer in the US, moved heaven and earth to get access to an experimental treatment for him; but the access came too late for him to benefit from it. I know a thing or two about cancer, both from experience and from research, and you are a fucking asshole to presume otherwise.

The fact that people have died and continue to die of cancer is proof of the deadly power of cancer. Your idea that the medical profession can cure it but CHOOSES NOT TO is petulant infantile fantasy.

Big Red, I'll try to reply to your post tomorrow.

Sorry about you're loss, however my position stands as is.
 

breeze

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I have a friend who's ex-girlfriend attended harvard medical school.
She told him she was shocked to find out how little they really understood. Beats me. While a cure for cancer{s} may be far off or never found from what i understand its a preventable disease. If i remember 40% or so of us will get cancer and and 40% or so heart disease. But the american cancer society has stated that 1.} 1/3 of cancers are caused by smoking 2.}1/3 eating red meat 3.} other 1/3 by other factors. The factors or %s might have changed. There are theories that x-rays play a part in cancers for example. I don't know many of the details but a stock recommended by RBC capital { sgen } is on the verge of getting fda approval for a cancer drug{maybe major} so i suppose there is some work being done on cancer drugs by biotech companies. If anyone here is interested there is a very hot biotech stock. I'm NOT recommending it to anybody because of the uncertainly of stocks as you may well know. Its siga which has developed st-246 or the only known cure for smallpox. It just received a 2.8B contract from HH and was set to move up on monday { how much is anyone's guess } but a last minute protest was filed with the GAO by another company. Only .000023 of protests are upheld by the GAO. Do dd if interested.
 

B_jdunhill

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I live in Edmonton, and our local newscast was relatively quiet when they glossed over this. I have watched this thread for a couple of days now....Our university is actually on the cutting edge of both general cancer studies and diabetes, especially juvenile. I have no doubt that we ARE closer than anyone in the world to breaking through but again, having seen cancer/death close up many times it is worth noting that there are thousands of cancers out there....this breakthrough was a treatment for only one. One. Worth analysis but also aprehension until what we have learned can either be replicated on other cancer variants or adapted to be a more universal 'lead' to follow.

It's all good news.
 

BobLeeSwagger

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Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research. Very little progress. $200 billion per year spent on cancer treatment in the US alone. Nuff said.

Oddly, it's actually a sign of success. The longer a person lives, the more likely they are to develop cancer at some point. And people are living longer than ever. Many people who survive cancer die of another kind years later. People who would have died of a heart attack 40 years ago often survive instead, so that they have an opportunity to develop cancer later.

A disproportionate number of people who get and die of cancer are elderly. There are a lot more elderly people than there ever have been before. That's why cancer rates have not gone down drastically. But a given person's chance of surviving most types of cancer is much higher than it used to be.
 

dandelion

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my litmus test is a peer-reviewed study published in a scientific journal. These days, with the internet so handily available, any source that states a scientific "fact" needs to be backed up with as much legitimate science as possible, beginning with a published, peer-reviewed article.
Now the other day someone reported research he had done. I think the number was 1/3 of all peer reviewed, and indeed independently repeated, new discoveries turn out ten years later to have been wrong. He reported that wonder drugs just go down hill when people start using them and real results start to come in rather than studies.
 

Guy-jin

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Fact is, SONNY, that I watched my closest friend die of glioblastoma multiforme last year; and that with the help of another friend who works in biotechnology and has contacts among some of the leading researchers on that cancer in the US, moved heaven and earth to get access to an experimental treatment for him; but the access came too late for him to benefit from it. I know a thing or two about cancer, both from experience and from research, and you are a fucking asshole to presume otherwise.

The fact that people have died and continue to die of cancer is proof of the deadly power of cancer. Your idea that the medical profession can cure it but CHOOSES NOT TO is petulant infantile fantasy.

Big Red, I'll try to reply to your post tomorrow.

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It's little consolation, but GBM is the most deadly cancer. Even with the best treatment possible, it's morbidity is unmatched. There are cancers that kill more people, but there is not, to my knowledge, a cancer that kills a greater percentage of the people it affects. Having known a large number of people who've had it (and died from it) now, all I can say is that it is, in my opinion, the true embodiment of a genetic nightmare. I and many work very hard to see it cured one day and it is hurtful to see people saying they think we'd hide it if we had an effective treatment.

Let me echo what you're saying about cancer treatment.

I have worked intimately with GBM (I am a doctor) and I can tell everyone here: We do not have a cure.

However, we are working damn hard on it, and I'll thank you not to imply or state that we'd hide it.

That said, there are successes. For example:


There has been recent evidence over the past year that vaccinations against EBV (a latent virus that's very common in humans) can kill GBMs in patients. Basically, the GBM starts to express all sorts of latent gene sequences in its DNA including sequences from the Epstein-Barr Virus (which are usually latent and not expressed). By vaccinating against EBV, the immune system attacks any cells expressing EBV proteins--in this case, that would be GBM tumors.

This is the cutting edge of cancer treatment research. You are absolutely insane if you think anyone has anything to gain by hiding the cure for cancer. Not only would it be impossible to hide such a thing from the scientific community (trust me, I'm part of it, we will find out and let the "secret" out), but the cure for cancer is the golden ticket, folks. Whoever were to own it would be the richest, most successful individual/institute/drug company in the world.

Here is a news story reported by CBS News In San Francisco. The first person to be cured of Aids. I would think the news media would be all over this. However, its not being reported much. Here is the link with a video report. Amazing story.

Apparent Immunity Gene ‘Cures’ Bay Area Man Of AIDS

The crazy part is, that's not "new" news. The HIV research and greater biomedical research community has known about this for a while now. Why isn't it more common as a treatment?

I'll give you hint: It begins with stem and it ends with the potential of giving people cancer after curing them of HIV. And it's honestly being delayed because anti-retrovirals have proven so incredibly effective that the riskier stem cell treatment is a hard sell generally.

I can honestly say I think we'll have HIV licked completely in the next decade. Probably much sooner. Cancer, though, is a different beast entirely. We already have some forms of it cured, but it is such a nightmare.
 

Guy-jin

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That's assuming the cure was either a unique substance or process that could be patented. If not, then the drug companies, used to gross margins in the tens of thousands of percent, would not even bother to produce the cure in question. Only small margin producers would get into that game. The bottom line is that, unless an effective cure to cancer could be patented, the drug companies would lose hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue which would threaten trillions of dollars of stock market capitalization.

There are thousands of researchers, myself included, who do not work for big pharma or biotechs. We are also performing research striving to cure cancer. Even if big pharma were trying to "block" the cure from coming out, it would fail. The vaccine treatment i described above is the product of academic research, for example.

You are wrong about the patent issue as well. What cure would there be that didn't involve a substance or process? Magic? Even that's a "process" if it can be demonstrated to be repeatable. :tongue:

Yeah, exactly! We all know that the biggest banks in the history of the world didn't act in "benign cooperation" to bankrupt their smaller competitors during the financial crisis. Or how the largest energy producers in the history of the world don't purposefully limit refinery capacity to keep gas prices up (and won't even think about buying out or bankrupting anyone who dare try to compete with them). And the government, as we all know, will never step in and try to help industry with bailouts or legislation designed to limit competition. Nah, those are all just conspiracy theories. :rolleyes::tongue:
Sarcasm aside, your point is both irrelevant and utterly defeated by the fact that academia has a stake in the whole thing. We are not controlled by big pharma. We are not in cahoots with them. Quite the contrary.

Moreover, you fail to explain why, if one company discovered the ultimate cure for all cancer, it would feel the need to collude with other companies that don't have said cure and not release it. That's simply illogical. Said company would make money hand-over-fist off the treatment and absolutely crush its competition.

There would be literally no logical reason to do it. This is in contrast to your comparisons to the banks, oil companies, government, et cetera, which all had logical (albeit morally bankrupt) reasons for doing what they did.

Don't get me wrong here, folks. I'm the last person who'd tell you big pharma and biotechs are looking out for anyone but themselves. However, they do not have the power (or, frankly, the impetus) to hide something like the cure for cancer. Even were one of them to discover it and inexplicably keep it secret (which, again, would be completely illogical), it would come out in the not so distant future through independent research or leaks.
 
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Calboner

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Sorry about you're loss, however my position stands as is.
Yes, and the dismal quality of your reasoning stands too.
For the straight scoop on this supposed cancer cure, consult PZ Myers.
Thanks for that link. Here is an extract for the benefit of those who don't care to read the whole piece:

So we have one popular account that is badly written and makes exaggerated claims. There is also a university press release, the source for the sloppy popular account, that doesn't contain the egregious stupidities but does tend to inflate basic research studies into an unwarranted clinical significance. And then, of course, there are the actual peer reviewed papers that describe the research and rationale, and also the reservations, on DCA. It's like a game of telephone: you can actually trace the account from the sober science paper to the enthusiastic press release to the web account with its extravagant claims of a simple, cheap cure for cancer, and see how the story is gradually corrupted. It would be funny if the final result wasn't going to dupe a lot of desperate people. . . .

We should be urging further investigation of this promising drug with the beginning of clinical trials, but it's far too early to be babbling about "cancer cures". There have been lots of drugs that look great in the lab and have excellent rationales for why they should work, but the reality of cancer is that it is complicated and diverse and there are many more pitfalls between a drug that poisons cancer cells in a petri dish and a drug that actually works well in the more complex environment of a human being.

One other factor that inflames the conspiracy nuts over this drug is that DCA is simple, dirt-cheap, and completely unpatentable — there is no economic incentive for a pharmaceutical company to invest a gigantic bucket of money in clinical trials, because there is no hope for a return on the investment.

This is why an independent academic community with research funded for knowledge rather than profit is so important, and really emphasizes why we cannot afford to privatize all biomedical research.

Guy-Jin, many thanks for your comments. I am pretty sure that I know enough about these matters to recognize distorted reasoning (as exhibited by Big_Red and Parr) when I see it, but I don't have the sort of command of details that is necessary for making a compelling counter-case, such as you have provided.