Life-giving Poisons

"Your going to need chemotherapy." After getting your cancer diagnosis, I can't think of a much more frightening piece of news. While neither I nor any of my loved ones have had cancer [knock on wood], I've worked around cancer in one way or another for most of the last 10 years.

What I've learned is that chemo is, or at least has been, a poison that basically kills the tumor faster than it kills the patient, but that, if successful, gives life.

A gross oversimplification? Perhaps. Which is why I want to write a book that tells the story of chemo, to understand where it comes from, where it's going, what we've done with it...and what it's done with us.

thomas.rm.ulrich [at] gmail....

Jun 3

"'The key, I think, to the future of cancer drug development is to try to identify which patients are likely to respond and to do so in' early-stage clinical trials."

Ten years ago, targeted cancer treatments like Avastin and Herceptin were lauded as the silver bullets of chemotherapy. What we’ve learned since then is that for these targeted treatments to work, you have to closely match them to the precise genotype of a patient’s tumor (and, if I recall, in some cases of the patient, too). While this allows doctors to fine tune treatment for patients with tumors containing these mutations (making treatment more personalized), it means that the number of patients that can be helped (translated: the potential market) by any given targeted drug is that much smaller.

chemothestory posted this