Nacogdoches doctor predicts long road to cancer cure

Fox News Medical A-Team member Dr. Marc Siegel suggested to the hosts of Fox & Friends on Thursday that Barack Obama should not push to cure cancer because he was the “wrong commander-in-chief” for the job. When he announced in October that he would not run for president, he called for a “moonshot in this country to cure cancer”. The President underscored the importance of mobilizing public resources into medical research to search for cancer cure.

That’s why President Obama’s announcement of a new national effort to cure cancer resonated well with Mr. Thomas.

“Cancer researchers rely on the national government for the bulk of our funding and funding has been flat for 10 years”, said Dr. Michelle Le Beau of the University of Chicago Cancer Center.

“Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer”, Obama said. The former US Vice-president became the poster boy of climate change- a path he chose after withdrawing from politics following a controversial defeat to George Bush back in 2000. However, medical experts are not in agreement, with the fact that cancer can be cured for always.

Statistics from the American Cancer Society predict 600,000 people will die from the disease this year, and 1.6 million men and women will be diagnosed.

Now that cancer is considered a disease of the genome, with at least hundreds of variations, access to information about common mutations and the efforts to fight them is considered critical for progress against the disease. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates recently invested in a cancer blood test startup called Grail, created out of DNA-sequencing company Illumina Inc. “We will help the oncology community improve communication with doctors across the United States and around the world, so the same care provided to patients at the world’s best cancer centers is available to everyone who needs it”.

“You’re on the cusp of some phenomenal breakthroughs”, he said. “What we’re going to see is more and more cancers getting cured more and more often”.

“But the science, data, and research results are trapped in silos, preventing faster progress and greater reach to patients”. Brawley thinks that will help. “Unfortunately, we see some patients don’t respond to these wonderfully new therapies and some patients that do respond initially eventually develop resistance to those therapies and so the tumor returns”, Bertagnolli says. “It’s going to allow them to fund many different programs as opposed to when the budget was being cut and costs were going up”.

While Obama’s proposal seems heavily focused on development of new treatments, there does need to be support for research in prevention, screening and the dissemination of new research findings.

Dr. Varmus also pinpointed reimbursement as a key move, particularly those from Medicare and Medicaid. Only 5% of cancer patients get into clinical trials. The increase lifts NIH funding to $32 billion, the first significant increase in 12 years.

Catching cancer before it spreads gives the patient the best survival chance, often even better than those numbers.

The statement said that the effort would include “the design and testing of effective, tailored treatments for cancer by expanding genetically based clinical cancer trials, exploring fundamental aspects of cancer biology, and establishing a national “cancer knowledge network” that will generate and share new knowledge to fuel scientific discovery and guide treatment decisions”.

No, you can’t. Scientists who study cancer will even tell you flat out that cancer isn’t one disease, it’s a multitude of diseases.