The War on Cancer

Happy 2012.

I thought I'd start the new year by looking back -- it's been a little over 40 years since then President Nixon declared a "war on cancer," on December 23, 1971, increasing funding for research and bringing cancer into the national consciousness. It's been a heck of a fight, and while the war isn't over, we've clearly won some battles.

December 23's edition of "Science Friday," the NPR radio show, looked at the War on Cancer. (You can listen to the broadcast, or read a transcript, at this link.)

The guest on the show was Dr. Harold Varmus, currently the director of the National Cancer Institute, and winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his cancer research, which showed how normal genes are transformed by carcinogens and thus cause cancer. In the broadcast, Dr. Varmus addresses a bunch of issues in cancer research that show how things have changed in the last 40 years.


For instance, Varmus discusses personalization, and the trend toward treating each patient's cancer as unique. He also expresses some excitement at attempts to use the body's immune system to fight off cancer, something that researchers were't very excited about until recently. He discusses this particularly in terms of the use of antibodies, which are the body's natural defense against invaders, and the success that researchers have had in using them. (He doesn't mention Rituxan specifically, but it fits into that discussion.) He mentions the treatment Ipilimumab, which messes with the body's suppression mechanism, allowing it to fight off cancer on its own. This treatment has been successful in about 30% of patients with melanoma.

He also discusses some other cutting-edge issues, like genome mapping and micro-environment studies, things that I've been reading a lot about and trying to report here.

Overall, it's a nice broadcast, touching on a number of current issues. But mostly it's a nice reminder of how far we've come in the last 40 years. My guess is that we'll make even more progress more quickly than we have since Nixon was president.

That's my wish for the new year, anyway.