A Cure for Cancer: An Update

I was reading something recently that discussed the difficulties of finding "a cure for cancer," and it got me thinking about a few things.

First, there's not really such as thing as "cancer." There are actually about 200 different diseases that are considered forms of cancer. In fact, some experts say there are as many as 60 different types of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Heck -- even what we call "Follicular Lymphoma" shows itself in lots of different ways, and overviews like the ones I looked at in my last post separate differnt types of FL when discussing them.

My point is, when we talk about "cancer," we're not really talking about one thing.

My other thought was, "Didn't some company say they were going to cure cancer in the next year? I wonder how that's going?"

Sure enough, it's been a little over a year since I wrote about some folks who claimed to have a cancer treatment that 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."

The treatment, called MuTaTo, is an immunotherapy. Like other immunotherapies, it uses the body's immune system to go after cancer cells by targeting something on the surface of the cell. But since cancer cells mutate, that target could change, making the immunotherapy ineffective. MuTaTo targets three different things on the cancer cell, making the cancer cells easier to find and eliminate. 

It actually sounds like a great idea, at least in theory.

The problem with MuTaTo is that it was still closer to the "theory" stage than the "reality" stage. It had only been tried in vitro, in a laboratory, not on actual patients. It could very well work. Unfortunately, clinical trials with actual patients takes a long time -- years long. As much as we'd like a treatment to be available immediately,  we also want to now that the treatment will be effective for a long time, and that any harmful side effects are fully explored. there's no point in approving a treatment that "cures" 100% of patients within a year, but that also stops working after 2 years, or causes heart damage that kills patients after 3 years, but nobody knows that because there were no trials, or only very short ones.

I did a quick search for the company making these claims, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies, and there really hasn't been much news from them in about a year. I did find an article that said the company would really like to publish the results of its research in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but it can't afford to. They did, apparently, find the funding to publish in an open-access journal, showing proof of concept, and giving the results of some experiments involving mice. The article essentially gives more detail, in a more reputable place, than the press releases and interviews from a year ago. But they still haven't made much progress in a year.

Which, in some ways, is just fine. As I said, better to take it slow and make sure things are effective and safe over time.

The problem comes with the promise that 1) it will all happen in a year, and 2) it will cure all cancers.

I hope, some day, it does. That would be pretty wonderful.

But,for me, that's the lesson in all of this -- Hope is a beautiful thing, but a kind of informed, slightly skeptical hope is probably a little bit better. It's easy to get excited about big claims, especially when they are about something we want so badly. But better to enjoy the rush of the initial excitement and then step back look a little more closely.

There's still lots to be excited about, and lots to be hopeful for, in our futures as Follicular Lymphoma patients. 

And I hope we're al around to see it happen, even if it's a long time from now.