Cancer Cured Within a Year? (No.)

A couple of weeks ago, there was a newspaper article making its way around the internet. It described a company that claimed it had found a way to beat cancer, and that they would have a cure for cancer available within a year.

I saw the article linked in a couple of online groups, and on Twitter. The company behind the "cure" claimed that their treatment would "be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market."

People were getting very excited about it.

This is a good reminder that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. At the very least, it's probably a good idea to not get too excited too quickly.

I think I was OK with the first two claims (it will be effective right away and the treatment will only take a few weeks). But then the third one made me raise an eyebrow (no side effects?), and the fourth one really made me stop (a cure for cancer that is cheaper than anything else out there? You're not going to cash in on this?)

Since then, I've read a few other pieces that kind of poke holes in this story. (This one from Wired is probably the best.)

First, the treatment, as I understand it: It's called MuTaTo, and it's a kind of Immunotherapy. Like other Immunotherapy treatments, it uses the body's immune system to attack cancer cells (something the immune system doesn't do on its own, without some help). Some immunotherapies target a protein on the surface of the cell, so they know which cells to tell the treatment to go after. the problem, according to the makers of MuTaTo, is that cancer cells mutate, so the target is no longer available for the treatment. But MuTaTo does not go after a single target. Instead, it goes after a chain of three peptides on the surface of the cell. Peptides are chains of amino acids, the things that make up proteins. They believe that cancer cells cannot mutate 3 targets the way they can mutate a single target, so the treatment should be able to find the cell more easily and kill it off.

Think of it this way. If your dog grabbed one of your socks and ran with it, you'd have a hard time catching it if you could only grab onto the sock. There's a good chance the dog would swallow it before you got to her. (This happens to me all the time because my dog is a little brat.) Now, if your dog grabbed a sock, but also had a leash and collar on, you'd have an easier time. You could grab the leash, the collar, or the sock, before the sock got swallowed. You'll save the sock and you'll save money on the large veterinarian's bill that will come later.

Now, this is actually a neat treatment, in theory. It's very much in line with a lot of other Immunotherapies.

The problem? It's a neat treatment in theory.


So far, the treatment has been tried in vitro (in test tubes, as they say), and in mice. No human clinical trials yet. Those will start "soon," according to the article, and "could be completed in a few years."

A few years? So where did that "cure for cancer within a year" thing come from?

Here's the bottom line, in my opinion as someone who spends way more time reading about cancer than he would have liked:

This treatment might very well be a cure for cancer. It most certainly won't be a cure for cancer within a year. And it might not work at all. Unfortunately, fewer than 10% of cancer treatments that start the clinical trial/approval process are ever actually approved. And, as we all know, the number of them that cure cancer (all cancer, as the company claims) has so far been 0%.

So this might be a success. We might all be celebrating in 10 years. But we might also never hear from them again.

In the meantime, we stay hopeful, but we stay realistic, and we keep living our lives.