I am not pessimistic on cancer cure. Are we really helpless in dealing with little tiny cancer cells? Where does the problem lie?
The article continued:
NASA came into existence on Oct. 1, 1958. Eleven years later, two men were dancing on the moon. Sequencing the entire human genome took just 18 years from the time the idea was born at a small gathering of scientists in Santa Cruz, California. It took merely three years to build an atomic device from a uranium isotope under the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project.
Open any major journal and 80% of it is mice or drosophila [fruit flies] or nematodes [worms] are used as experimental subject. After all, if so many promising drugs that clobbered mouse cancers failed in man, the reverse is also likely: More than a few of the hundreds of thousands of compounds discarded over the past 20 years might have been truly effective agents.
It is exciting to see a tumor shrink in mouse or man and know that a drug is doing that. A shrinking tumor is intuitively a good thing. So it is no surprise that it's one of the key endpoints, or goals, in most clinical trials. That's in no small part because it is a measurable goal: We can see it happening. (When you read the word "response" in a newspaper story about some exciting new cancer drug, tumor shrinkage is what it's talking about.)Tumor shrinkage does not mean that there is no metastasis. In actual fact, many cancer patients eventually die of cancer metastasis.
Two Italian pharmacologists pored over the results of trials of 12 new anticancer drugs that had been approved for the European market from 1995 to 2000, and compared them with standard treatments for their respective diseases. The researchers could find no substantial advantages--no improved survival, no better quality of life, and no added safety--with any of the new agents. All of them, though, were several times more expensive than the old drugs. In one case, the price was 350 times higher.