Enough with the hype about underwhelming or speculative cancer treatments – Grey Enlightenment
Skip to content
The past two weeks have been especially eventful for overblown promises about cancer treatments, with a number of viral headlines touting supposed breakthroughs.
A New Path to Preventing Cancer
The byline "A Landmark Study Showing the Way Forward" sets up for the inevitable letdown upon reading further. Towards the end, the author adds the caveat, "Now this, of course, is retrospective. We don’t yet have a clinical trial to prove that lung cancer can be reduced by 50% with the 14-protein biomarkers and the antibody treatment. That is the next step along the way." So in other words a coin toss optimistically.
The biggest problem is lung cancer develops fast and is rapidly lethal. Even if a high risk cohort were identified, it would require constant screening to possibly prevent the cancer from sneaking up . And then lots of false positives and false negatives– from both the unnecessary screening of cancer and the biomarker missing cancers. Just a big "meh". Biomarkers have been touted as promising early cancer detection for more than fifty years, yet they have never delivered on that.
Second:
New CRISPR Technique Selectively Shreds Cancer Cells, Including “Undruggable” Cancers
This went hugely viral on Hacker News days ago, with 600 comments. Again, long on promises and short on details. CRISPR is one of the most overhyped therapies of the past decade. So far it has only some success with sickle cell disease and inherited blindness–not exactly big markets and a long way from curing cancer. Maybe one day CRISPR will rise to the high expectation placed on it, but right now there is nothing here. Not even a mouse model.
It reminds me of immunotherapy, in which the immune system is recruited to kill cancer. Sounds good in theory—but save for some cases–this turned out to be much easier said than done. As it turns out, the immune system does many things well, but fighting cancer is not among them.
And finally, New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times. This also went hugely viral on Hacker News last week, with 600 comments.
Scientists are not usually an excitable bunch. So when many thousands of them recently gave a spontaneous standing ovation (with cheering) in the middle of a lecture, it meant something special happened. At a conference in Chicago at the end of May oncologists went wild over the results of a drug called daraxonrasib, which treats pancreatic cancer. The drug almost doubled median survival times from 6.7 months to 13.2 months. This victory over one of the most challenging cancers was an emotional moment for some.
As it turns out "much longer survival" amounts to 13 months vs 7. At this rate, doubling survival time, people with pancreatic cancer will eventually outlive everyone. OK, this is a joke, but we’re talking something which is universally lethal that is still lethal, but now just a tiny but slower at killing its victims. That’s about long enough for a new football season, from start to start and finish.
As someone in the comments notes, this only applies to 20% off pancreatic tumors, which have the necessary KRAS mutation for the treatment to work. From the article, "All told, RAS mutations are found in 20% of all cancers and in 3.4m cases of cancer globally every year. Little wonder that RAS has been a key target for oncologists since their discovery in 1982."
Treatments have come a long way for certain blood cancers, such as childhood leukemia, but in explaining why so little works, the hard reality is cancer is unlike any other illness. When solid cancers spread, the infiltrated tissue becomes unrecognizable. Bone turns into a brittle chalk-like substance. Cancer-infiltrated organs become blackened, fibrous masses, with ulcer-like tumors carving out cratered surfaces that resemble the moon. It’s like how does one begin to even treat this? Once cancer has escaped the containment zone, treatment becomes palliative. The only options are to hack away at organs, and at some point you cannot remove any more.
I think these metaphors are unhelpful when describing potential cancer therapies, whether it’s talk of "switches," "shredding," or "targeting" cancer. They create unrealistic expectations and aren’t even particularly accurate descriptions of how these treatments actually work. Yes, I know the public’s attention and government funding in part depends on overselling such findings, but cancer patients need treatment that works–as in adding years of life–not months. Using this vivid language for underwhelming treatments only sets up for disappointment.
Search…
Recent Posts
Pages
Archives
Archives
Archives
Categories
Meta