Medicine is stagnating in cancer treatment and research?
If you ask the typical layperson, he or she will say that medicine is doing wonders today in cancer treatment and research but the FDA published a 'panic bulletin' in 2008 noting that the number of new drug approval requests had declined for the first time since the approval process was established, and the typical patent attorney will tell you that the drug patenting laws are now inappropriate because they were designed to protect major therapeutic breakthroughs which are no longer happening. The death rates for many forms of cancer have not improved significantly for decades at all.Well in short, medicine is stagnating, but the public is being told the opposite with cancer treatment and research.The cancer foundation and all non profit ,public and private sectors are getting whopping money that is outrageous for cancer treatment and research !!With little to no improvements at alll in the past 20 to 25 years. What is going on?
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What on earth are you talking about? While there are many forms of cancer that have not had significant improvements in death rates in the last several decades, there are also dozens upon dozens that have had major, dramatic improvements as a result of new drugs. The development of the Taxol class alone in the mid 1990s dramatically changed the prognosis for over a dozen different cancers. Herceptin took the five year survival rate of inflammatory breast cancer from less than 1%, to exceeding 60%, essentially overnight. Liposomally encapsulated Doxirubicin was a dramatic improvement over the old form, improving tolerability and success rates. Revlimid, while expensive and still new, has utterly change the outcomes in multiple myeloma. I mean, in the last couple years we've gotten a vaccine that could eliminate between 70-90% of cervical cancers if widely adopted. We have an approved gene therapy product on the market. There's ex-vivo transgenic techniques that just came about, literally within the last two years that allow the creation of reprogrammed cytotoxic t-lymphocytes. There are now gene-therapy products targetted at cancer in Phase II and Phase III clinical trials by private companies. There are cancers we have made little progress in. Pancreatic cancer, and some forms of lung cancer come to mind. Renal Cell Carcinoma is problematic, but in the last five years ago some progress has been made via the tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Cancer is anything but a homogenous disease. It is complicated, and by and large the most difficult problem biology has ever tackled. But to say there has been no improvement in the last twenty five years is outrageous, insane and not true at all.
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Title : Medicine is stagnating in cancer treatment and research
Description : Medicine is stagnating in cancer treatment and research? If you ask the typical layperson, he or she will say that medicine is doing wond...