one can (never) cure cancer?

[iancampbell]

One more thing: A medical technology that would probably cure cancer along with just about every other disease of aging is medical nanotechnology

Medical nanotechnology, AKA nanomedicine, is an entire class of medicine. It isn't a specific product so whether or not it will cure one thing or all things is neither here nor there. In the setting we have omnimed that comes close but that's composed of very generalist medibots that can give rise to hundreds of different types (that can act in very different ways from the synthesis and release of drugs to binding together to form synthetic tissues). Such technology doesn't really mature til the First Fed at least. In real life such a thing is so far beyond our current understanding that it would be meaningless to make any sort of prediction.

Fair enough. I was thinking of Drexler, who is probably an authority on nanotech insofar as there is such a person so long before it actually emerges.

[chris0033547]

If you don't mind I want to continue updating this thread from time to time:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/...rainforest

“In preclinical trials we injected it into our models and within five minutes, you see a purpling of the area that looks like a bruise,” Boyle, from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute said.

“About 24 hours later, the tumour area goes black, a couple of days later you see a scab, and at around the 1.5 week mark, the scab falls off, leaving clean skin with no tumour there. The speed certainly surprised me.”

What do you think? How long will it take for them to make a drug or injection out of it?

[Rynn]

Short on time so have to post quickly. This drug damages large tumours when injected into them, but that's not such a massive breakthrough. Better ways of dealing with tumours are always good but as the article says this treatment wouldn't necessarily be any better than conventional chemotherapy.

[chris0033547]

However if you look at the comments under the timeline-graph, you can see one specific comment from someone called 'Diego Delgado'. Here's the video from the comment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5KLTonB3Pg

So according to the expert Ido Bachelet significant advances for various forms of cancer treatment (maybe even a cure or in other words a 100%-five-year-survival-rate for all forms of cancer?) may become possible somethere around 2020? Because the video itself was posted in 2013 and Dr. Bachelet mentions that the DNAbots in the video may become usable in humans after five years.

I seriously wonder now, what to think about Dr. Bachelet. It seems that he's trying to significantly speed up his research or something like that:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comme...ming_that/

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/ido-bac...trial.html

As you can see from the reddit-discussion specialists in the field are really sceptical about all this, while others say that this guy is actually a renowned scientist and also met Shimon Peres last year:

http://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php?id=33&p...&news=2084

Dr. Ido Bachelet, a returning scientist from MIT who completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, discussed the nanorobots he is developing from molecular DNA which can help epileptics, check when diabetics need insulin and how much, and can identify twelve types of cancer and kill cancer cells without affecting healthy cells. Bachelet has given three demonstrations to the US Food and Drug Administration and is hoping to be able to start clinical tests within a year.

I doubt that Peres would meet a - sorry for the crude word - charlatan. On the other hand one commenter on reddit mentioned the Schön scandal. But then again why would a renowned scientist like him lie about his advances? Not to mention that he has a sick daughter:

Ido's daughter has a leg disease which requires frequent surgery. He is hoping his DNA nanobots will make the type of surgery she needs relatively trivial - a simple injection at a doctor's office.

If all his claims are nothing but hot air then I believe that he would be basically risking his career and his job. And I doubt that he would risk all that, because his daughter needs him and he probably needs to have a stable job with a stable income for her needs. Anyway here's another older article about all this:

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease...-responses

The way, I understand it so far, Ryan's main arguments that these "bots" of his are actually no bots at all still stands. And then he says that his "bots" will "scan" the body for cancer cells, it doesn't seem to be like that either. The way, I understood the reddit-thread-comments, he will inject billions of these "nanocontainers" into the patient and they will simply float around inside the body until some of them bind to a target cell (e.g. cancer cell) and then the container should open due to the contact with the cell's surface and release its deadly payload, which can be something like EBC-46 or something else I suppose?

[Rynn]

Pretty much yes it's just another type of nanoparticle designed to deliver a payload, that's not to say it isn't a good idea (my own research is currently investigating a nanoparticle and micro particle deli you system) but it's just one amongst hundreds, if not thousands of nanoparticle delivery systems. For decades this type of technology has been researched and there are already commercial products using this sort of technology, Doxorubicin for example is a commercial chemotherapy agent delivered by a microparticle.

DNA microparticle are one of many different promising and interesting technologies. Dr Bachelet isn't saying anything which is obviously untrue but he's certainly employing some very typical marketing strategies. Yes there are applications in multiple areas for microparticle delivery systems, from diagnostic to treatment in a variety of disease but the way he paints it is that he has a potential panacea in the form of a biological, nanoscale robot. In reality if his research came to fruition then it's most likely that it would result in an incremental improvement in patient outcome in one, maybe a handful, of treatments over a long time. It is most definitely not going to be an instant cure for dozens of different serious diseases.

[chris0033547]

[..] In terms of curing cancer there are plenty of advances that have helped improve survival rates over time. Hopefully this will continue and I'm optimistic about it. I'm not in cancer research but a few things that I think are quite interesting (if not promising) are:

- Drug delivery systems for conventional treatments. [..]

- Theranostics. [..]

- Cancer Immunotherapy. [..]

These are just three of many, many different experimental cancer treatments.

Just wanted to add another potential future treatment to this list:

Antisense therapy

Although it's interesting to note that even though doctors successfully treated rhesus monkeys against Ebola using Antisense in early 2006 there doesn't seem to be any successful anti-Ebola drugs based on this nine years later. Well maybe this is normal after all, because tests on new drugs can take as long as 20 years (and noone thought that a cure for Ebola would be so urgently needed in 2014 and 2015). But maybe these kind of treatments will appear around 2030... Or maybe the problem is with the constant hype, the media are causing around new advances in medicine. Each new discovery is heralded as a breakthrough and then the doctors either discover a problem with the "breakthrough" and the media go silent on the story so that they don't have to discredit themselves by reporting that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough after all but another incremental step in the right direction or the "breakthrough" was not a breakthrough from the start but just got hyped up by the media. Yes, the more I think about it the more it seems that the media are the problem. Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction. And when people get disillusioned with medicine or any other scientific area, which gets hyped up like that, conspiracy theories (Big Pharma, etc.) start to sprout. (Although some conspiracy theories may contain a grain of truth:

http://vadamagazine.com/11/07/2014/lifes...sippi-baby

One of the major barriers to finding a cure for HIV is funding – treating the virus is very lucrative for pharmaceutical companies and the cost of clinical trials is expensive.

The head of Infectiology/HIV at the University Clinic Bonn and former president of the German AIDS Society, Professor Jürgen Rockstroh, confirms this: ‘The climate for private investment in HIV/AIDS research these days is very limited.’

)

So to sum it all up:

• Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.
  
• Medicine, which doesn't heal the patient but keeps a disease in check generates more money than medicine, which heals the patient ( ? ).
  

[Rynn]

Or maybe the problem is with the constant hype, the media are causing around new advances in medicine. Each new discovery is heralded as a breakthrough and then the doctors either discover a problem with the "breakthrough" and the media go silent on the story so that they don't have to discredit themselves by reporting that the breakthrough was not a breakthrough after all but another incremental step in the right direction or the "breakthrough" was not a breakthrough from the start but just got hyped up by the media. Yes, the more I think about it the more it seems that the media are the problem. Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.

I'd say you were spot on there. I'm always trying to explain this to people when they say they heard of a breakthrough last year so where is it? There's this expectation created by the media that science progresses through a series of big Eureka! moments i.e. for ages nothing happens then one day a scientist makes a huge breakthrough. Naturally they expect products to start hitting the shelves very quickly after. In reality it's almost always slow increments.

• Articles, which constantly talk about breakthroughs in some scientific area sell better than articles, which objectively talk about incremental advances in the right direction.
  
• Medicine, which doesn't heal the patient but keeps a disease in check generates more money than medicine, which heals the patient ( ? ).
  

I don't think the last one is fair to say, there are thousands of examples of medicines that cure the patient and are profitable, from antibiotics to chemotherapy. People love to say that Big Pharma isn't interested in cures and whilst I'm no great fan of medicine for profit this isn't a universal truth. The issue is that some types of cure are difficult/impossible to make a profit from, either because of practical costs or because of regulatory issues. Take phage therapy for example; a somewhat promising treatment for bacterial infections by using viruses to kill the bacteria. Considering the problems with antibiotic resistance you would think this would be a big area of research, but aside from some work in Russia (curtailed since the fall of the Soviet Union) it gets little attention outside of basic lab work. The reason is that phages mutate very quickly so even if a company has a patent on a phage another company could simply take it, put it in a dish with bacteria and evolve a new strain that is just as good. In essence the first company has to spend all the initial R&D cost but loses out on the profit.

There are also practical concerns of course, it's certainly not a technology that's ready to hit the street, but it gives you an idea of why some things don't get taken up by companies. And from a company's perspective that's entirely sensible and logical. What we need is to not rely so much on profit-seeking companies so that we can develop and produce medicines that aren't reliant on how profitable they will be.

[chris0033547]

What we need is to not rely so much on profit-seeking companies so that we can develop and produce medicines that aren't reliant on how profitable they will be.

Yes, these are my thoughts as well! I also read your article about seeking an alternative for capitalism, which you wrote in this thread:

http://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1140

However even though I think that it would be too early to seek an alternative for capitalism, because humanity hasn't developed a post-scarcity global civilisation yet, there may be specific ways to give pharmaceutical companies more incentives to develop new treatments for diseases. I think that the only way to do it in our current society is crowdfunding. Unfortunately current crowdfunding methods don't work very well as can be seen here for example:

https://www.crowdrise.com/CUREEBOLA

The accumulation rate of money seems to be rather slow when it comes to crowdfunding and I think that it's impossible to collect large sums of money like this in order to finance new research directions in medicine. However if one could find ways to make crowdfunding much more effective it might be possible to circumvent the influence of big pharmaceutical companies on the medical market and do research directly sponsored by "people on the street".

When I watch TV for example sometimes advertisements for the state lottery pop up on the screen. One can participate in this state lottery and - if one is extremely lucky - win huge sums of money. The state lottery is an additional source of income for the state. So I wonder, why there are no state programs to organize a state lottery dedicated to the support of specific research fields like medicine? People would play in this lottery and the collected money would be used for projects like 'CUREEBOLA' above. I think that this approach would generate a "medical arms race" with the established pharmaceutical companies and give them an extra incentive to invest in new treatments for various diseases. (Otherwise those companies might go bankrupt if the crowdfunded research comes up with a better treatment for one disease or even several diseases.)

I mean states over the world already organize events like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_concert

The collected money usually goes to some charity organisations, which help some poor people somethere in the world for example. Sometimes catastrophes happen in the world and these kind of concerts are organized to accumulate gigantic sums of money:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitaria...earthquake

So I wonder, why the states around the world don't organize something similar like a "medical state lottery" or regular "benefit concerts" for the advancement of science and so on? This would surely put some pressure on the pharmaceutical companies around the world.

A question, which would've to be addressed is: Who decides, what to spend the collected money on? Somehow a public state-sponsored plattform (financed by the money, collected from the lottery) would've to be organized, where scientists could advertise their research fields for the general public (the participants of the lottery) and then people could make their votes. Well, something like this might work.

[Rynn]

However even though I think that it would be too early to seek an alternative for capitalism, because humanity hasn't developed a post-scarcity global civilisation yet

I don't think we need to reach that stage to drastically change, if not move beyond, capitalism. Indeed I think most countries will have to at least start moving towards a social democracy model of capitalism before we start approaching post-scarcity. Otherwise we may end up in a situation where, rather than wealth beyond distributed, it's hoarded by a few and most people deal with pleasant but relatively poor and restrictive conditions. I won't go into that more here I'd suggest the short story Manna. It's not the best written story but it does show a believable world transitioning towards post-scarcity through automation. Problem is as the poor become unemployed they are rounded up and essentially imprisoned.

, there may be specific ways to give pharmaceutical companies more incentives to develop new treatments for diseases. I think that the only way to do it in our current society is crowdfunding. Unfortunately current crowdfunding methods don't work very well as can be seen here for example:

https://www.crowdrise.com/CUREEBOLA

The accumulation rate of money seems to be rather slow when it comes to crowdfunding and I think that it's impossible to collect large sums of money like this in order to finance new research directions in medicine. However if one could find ways to make crowdfunding much more effective it might be possible to circumvent the influence of big pharmaceutical companies on the medical market and do research directly sponsored by "people on the street".

I'm very skeptical that crowdfunding can be used in this way, for three reasons:

1) We already utilise indirect crowdfunding. We call it charity and some charities do this very well indeed: in 2014 Cancer Research UK raised £490 million ($735 million), over 80% of which went directly towards funding research. I somehow doubt that people will give more than they are already giving if they had to fund the research directly.

2) The people on the street don't have the relevant education to decide what to fund. This may sound harsh but it's true (it's also true for scientists in decisions outside of their field). The average person wanting to fund research will generally pick a disease they'd like to see cured: cancer, alzhiemer's, ebola etc. It then makes sense for them to give this money to a charity that will hire educated people to decide which scientific proposals make more sense to fund. If the average person was asked to choose between funding research between new nanopourous materials for rapid cancer genome analysis or the development of a new HER2-receptor inhibitor how are they meant to make an informed decision? Moreover will the majority of people have the time to even try to understand? I'd say the answer was pretty obviously no. Instead scientists would be force to advertise, to simplify and try to win over the lay public. That would lead to popularity and media contests, not funding the best science.

3) Crowdfunding almost never generates much money. There are five projects that have been funded more than ten million dollars, the highest recorded is around 50 million dollars (see here for more). The average cost of developing a new drug from concept to market is over $2 billion dollars. You would need more than fifty times the funding of the current world record just to develop one drug. I don't see that being at all common, or likely. Crowdfunding is great for minor projects, it's not a good model for long term multi-billion dollar projects. That's the realm of large companies and governments.

One can participate in this state lottery and - if one is extremely lucky - win huge sums of money. The state lottery is an additional source of income for the state. So I wonder, why there are no state programs to organize a state lottery dedicated to the support of specific research fields like medicine?

The lottery in my country does fund all sorts of things, some of which are scientific research. Whilst that is very good it's not a huge sum of money in the grand scheme of things. Again it gets back to that figure above: billions of dollars. That's the average cost. When you take into account that charities like Cancer Research UK throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem each year and we still make tiny improvements at a time it becomes clear how huge of a challenge this sort of thing is.

My PhD alone is funded, in total, to approximately $150,000. Many small labs in universities doing basic research receive grants of millions, which last the best part of a few years at most. Science is expensive and whilst we should look towards new ways of getting funding there isn't an effective, simple solution.

What we need is what we've always needed IMO: big government institutions that can annually spend billions of dollars to fund basic research and develop unprofitable but good medicines and a competitive market in medicines for drugs that can be "easily" produced and made profitable. To varying degrees different countries to have that. The big thing we lack is a concerted effort by governments to produce their own pharmaceuticals, even if it is at a financial loss.

[chris0033547]

( Alright, I hope you don't mind so far that I keep returning to this thread from time to time. I mean it's not like it hurts anyone that I sometimes update it, right? Others are more than welcome to do the same by the way. I hope that in the end this thread will evolve into something like a "rough historical timeline" of cancer research. So that one can see, what hopes people had in the past with the various approaches for cancer treatment and which approaches worked in the end and which ones didn't work. )

Anyway ... I just thought that this might be significant enough to be posted here:

This video is a short 7min-summary of the aricle at the bottom:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi2Ym1Q1-QA

And here's the lengthy three-page-long article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/20...ds-abound/

Well, the idea that one could not only focus on mice but also on other animals as well in order to find new cancer treatments is certainly interesting. To some extent people already do that when it comes to finding ways to delay aging:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speak...man-aging/