These days I’m not so thrilled with the number 4 as in stage 4 cancer. I hope to change that attitude by finding 1 drug that will attack a number of tumor targets driven by some number of my gene variants.
I love it when cancer patients say “no evidence of disease” (NED). Only a small number can say that. Think about these cancer numbers from the last 100+ years: thousands and thousands of researchers, millions of documents, trillions of dollars and only a tiny number of NEDS.
Shall I count the number of dead or say that a great number of you will be diagnosed and die from cancer in the next 2 decades. Aren’t we supposed to be further along in this war on cancer? Do you feel short changed? Do you see good numbers in our future? I say Yes and No. Some examples to consider.
Too much Competition.
View this video https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/health-science/how-cancer-can-be-tackled-with-immunotherapy/2016/04/19/42957df0-063a-11e6-bfed-ef65dff5970d_video.html?utm_term=.816e52cef236 from an article in the Washington post to see two prominent scientists working on great things, but catch the point on competition and take note of the work by the Parker Institute. View “Hacking Cancer Together” at https://www.parkerici.org/
Patient Registries.
A number of organizations are fine tuning patient registries which will help researchers, but not enough patients are signing up. Here is an example of organizations working on a lung cancer registry, visit their home page for more info: https://www.lungcancerregistry.org/about-us.html, and https://www.lungcancerfoundation.org.
Clinical trials, Bio Banks and Research Programs.
Clinical trials, Bio Banks and Research programs are extremely important but have too many restrictions and too few participants. A number of organizations are working on this:
. When clinical trials are fully enrolled, researchers have a greater chance of developing new treatments. For more info check these: https://www.statnews.com/2018/04/05/clinical-trials-excluding-patients/ and https://www.lazarex.org.
. You can be one in a million. Help researchers work toward new treatments. See https://www.joinallofus.org.
I hope you clicked on the links.
Summary.
Good things are happening that may give us better numbers; the Biden Cancer Initiative, Precision Medicine, Genomics, targeted therapy, and Immunotherapy. Bad things continue to happen with; weak participation, poor collaboration and poor communication.
So the bottom line is, you must engage and participate. Otherwise nothing changes, research remains slow, and potential life saving treatments never make it to market.
A new year is coming so lets get out and do something together.
