Newsweek Article

Songflower

Linda found the URL for the Newsweek article. I think it is really interesting. New drugs are certainly in the pipeline to help us.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/07/what-we-can-learn-from-curable-cancers.html

Love you all,
Diane

llight

Thanks for posting
Thanks for posting this! I found this part to be very interesting:

"The recognition that different tumors are powered by, and even addicted to, specific mutations is triggering a revolutionary change in how cancers are classified and treated. Treatment will be based not on the organ where the cancer began...but on the driver mutation—with luck, its Achilles’ heel....He estimates that some 200 drugs targeting driver mutations are in the pipeline....“It should be malpractice not to genotype cancer patients.”

"Genotyping is not even routine in the clinical trials that test experimental drugs.... The lesson of Gleevec and herceptin—identify the driver mutation and cripple it—is still being ignored, keeping what could be effective drugs from reaching the market. “You would be shocked at how primitive the molecular characterization of cancer is,” says cancer researcher Tyler Jacks of MIT. “Companies run big dumb trials” rather than test drugs only on patients whose cancer is driven by the mutation the drug targets. “There has to be a complete reassessment of how we do this.”
href=http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/07/what-we-can-learn-from-curable-cancers.html>http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/07/what-we-can-learn-from-curable-cancers.html