Sure, but the average biologist or chemist working at one of these companies hardly has a say in what conditions the company will pursue to develop medications. The board of directors and market strategies decide that, and those decisions are based on how much profit potential there is for their investment.
Is the war on cancer an ‘utter failure’?: A sobering look at how billions in research money is spent
I’m not sure but I thought all drugs work at basic level of molecules bonding . If you have virus , bacteria ,fungi ,cells and different types of cancers so on all have marker on it and the drug companies make drugs that bond to it.
Better metaphor would think of virus , bacteria ,fungi ,cells and different types of cancers has lock and drug you take a key that bonds to it.
So basic level drug companies would find problem type of virus , bacteria ,fungi ,cells and different types of cancer and find marker than find a molecules bonding that would bond to it. It could take decades or centuries to find right molecules to bond to it.
Uh-huh. And the board of directors and all the companies’ execs never get cancer, or have relatives and friends who do. So naturally their motive is to suppress cures. :rolleyes:
If it was as simple as “invent a vaccine, cure cancer” there’d be lots of cancer vaccines in use. And it’s ironic to see vaccines presented as an example of a non-profit motivated product, seeing that antivaxers view vaccines as a consummate example of Big Pharma running roughshod over people’s health in order to make money (getting diseases “naturally” is seen as far preferable, even though the need for resulting medical care makes Big Pharma even richer).
But then making sense never appeals to the sort of people who claim that “Drug companies just want to keep you sick”.
I did not suggest that drug companies want to keep people sick. I am suggesting that they are there to make money - that is their purpose - they do not develop, market, and sell medicine out of the kindness of their hearts.
I am suggesting that they could be avoiding research on curing illesses that are deemed not profitable (yes, even if someone on the board of directors is affected by a disease). They are in business to make money, not friends. I do not suggest that Big Pharma is not pursuing cancer drugs - they are, and the current ones are very expensive.
And, please, I am not an anti-vaxer.
This is…not entirely incorrect, but so oversimplified as to be essentially wrong. If it were as simple as “different types of cancer all have marker on it”, then we could cure it next year.
Smeghead from what I understand the problem is finding right bond is what is very complex and takes very long time.
What I mean by top down approach or bottom up approach is this.
Picture you self has a chemist you want to cure a type of cancer or virus you have marker on it but the **complex is making the drug **to bond to it.It like telling you okay I have house with lock on it now go some where on earth and find a key it going to take hundreds if not billions of years to find key even if you have hundred people looking for it.
In past drug makers made drugs with blind approach trying to extract chemicals of the plants ,leaves or flowers and trying millions of plants ,leaves or flowers to you find one that works it going take very log time if not ever to try them all even if 25% people on earth are trying all different plants ,leaves or flowers to you find the right one.
Now drug makers try to find right molecules that works on type of cancer or virus but this like trying to find only one purple ant some where on earth it going to take hundreds if not billions of years to find it 
o right bond.
Why not use bottom up approach built chemicals use nanotechnology or some thing?
Yes if we had quantum computers it be much faster to find the right bond that works but has of now it like trying to find needle in haystack the haystack has big has earth it going take hundreds if not billions years to find the right bond that works if you even find it.
Is the war on breast cancer an “udder failure”?
I found this today.
.
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/233786/why-america-can-never-give-up-on-medical-research
By looking this the US spends most than any other country.
I think you’re wrong about only one approach being used, sweat209. And it’s obvious that it doesn’t take researches billions of years to develop drugs.
This is incorrect, and the word “bond” is completely wrong here. I don’t have time to address the rest of this right now.
FTR, I’m doing a PhD in biology right now, and I’ve had my share of cancer biology reading to do.
Smeghead can you explain three things that explain any confusion here for all of us or any misunderstanding of this ( bond thing ) .
1.How drugs work.
2.How drug makers make drugs
3.why it takes long time to make a drug or to get drug to work how you want it .
All right, let me see how much of an overview I can get written in the time available.
The first thing to understand is that killing cancer is easy. There are lots of chemicals in your house right now that will do it, like bleach. The tricky part is killing cancer that’s in a human body, while leaving the rest of the body alive. So the holy grail in cancer research is to find targeted therapies that will be 100% deadly to cancer cells and 100% safe to normal cells. This, it turns out, is really really really hard.
One of the main reasons this is really hard is that cancer starts out as a normal cell. It’s not like a bacterial or viral infection, where some external organism has made its way in to the body and is going bonkers. In those cases, you can get the immune system on your side, because the invading organism has lots of stuff on and in it that the immune system recognizes as foreign. With cancer, all the stuff the cell makes is exactly the same stuff as your normal cell makes. It’s just making the wrong amounts, which leads to things like uncontrolled growth. This is why many therapies, like many types of chemotherapy and radiation, are simply designed to kill fast-growing cells. Cancer is fast-growing. Most of the body’s cells are not. So you kill off fast-growing cells, and you hopefully get rid of the cancer (and hair, and the lining of the digestive system) slightly faster than you’re killing the patient.
Now, it is true that there are often (in fact, let’s say always) mutations in cancer that make cancer cells different from normal cells, and this certainly provides potential theraputic targets. Imatinib, for instance, is a drug designed to inhibit a protein that is inappropriately turned on in certain types of leukemia. I know there’s at least one antibody that’s been approved for use as well, though its name escapes me right now. And I haven’t been directly involved in cancer in six or seven years, so more recent advances may have passed me by.
So, yes, it’s possible to find common mutations in some cancers and design drugs to take advantage of those, and this is being done. But there are problems with this approach, too. Here are a few of them:
-Cancers are all incredibly different. Any one mutation you target is only going to be present in some cancers, not all of them. Even within a specific type of cancer (i.e. lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, etc), some tumors will have the mutation and some won’t. And even with one specific tumor, often some cells will have it and some won’t. Often times, this leads to a natural selection-style effect. You kill off all the cells that are sensitive to the drug, and leave behind all the resistant ones to grow back and make a new tumor that’s now immune to the therapy.
-Whatever the mutation is that you’re treating, remember that it’s a change to a normal human protein. Depending on the protein and the mutation, there’s a chance that any drug you use against it might screw up normally functioning protein as well, leading to unfortunate side effects like death.
-It takes a HUGE amount of research and therefore money to design drugs like this. You have to figure out what mutations you want to look at, figure out what the protein does, how to target it, if targeting it will do anything useful - first in tissue culture, then in model organisms, then in clinical trials if you’re really really lucky (spoiler: the vast majority of candidate drugs fail somewhere in this process), how to get it into the body and into the tumor effectively, etc, etc, etc.
You might call this the “bottom-up” approach, where you start with a target and find a drug to inhibit it. By the way, this step, which you’re sort of vaguely calling a “bond”, is relatively straightforward. There are lots of places where you can send a protein with a specific activity and they will test thousands and thousands of known molecules to see if they can interfere with this activity. Typically, you’ll get back a list of dozens or hundreds of potential hits, which you can then start investigating further. You’re making it sound like this is the difficult part of the process, and once you’ve found a potential inhibitor, then the research is basically done apart from a few details. Neither one of these things is true.
So just to summarize, the list of things that I would say are (some of) the major hurdles between “I found a cancer I’m interested in” and “here’s a drug that cures the cancer I’m interested in” includes these:
-Finding a molecular target or targets that are specific to the cancer, commonly found in all or nearly all of the cancer cases out there, that can at least theoretically be treated effectively without damaging healthy tissue.
-Finding a drug that acts on the target.
-Proving that the drug effectively treats the cancer when it gets to it.
-Figuring out a way to get the drug into the body, past the body’s defenses, and to the cancer itself so that it’s still at an effective concentration when it gets there.
-Proving in strictly designed clinical trials that the drug is both safe and effective.
-Figuring out which cancer cases can be treated by the drug (ie, this drug only works on breast cancer when the patient has these inherited mutations, and these other drugs have already failed).
Also, I haven’t even mentioned the tendency for cancer to metastasize and self-inhibit. Metastasis is when chunks of the tumor break off and move to another part of the body and start growing there. Annoyingly, many times, it looks like the main tumor secretes chemicals that prevent these secondary tumors from growing, and when the main tumor is discovered and removed, the secondary tumors then start up and make things worse. I read one paper which suggested that one day, we might all just get used to the idea that we all need to have just a little cancer as we age to keep all the other cancers in check.
This is all just off the top of my head. No doubt others will be able to elaborate on things that I’ve missed out. I hope that at least I’ve managed to make clear why it’s more complicated than, “Oh, let’s just find a molecule on the cancer and then bind something to it.”
Very little of this is news. Back when *Penthouse *Magazine aspired to be the uber-Playboy, it ran some of the most intense and erudite articles on the planet. In about 1979 they ran a searing 3- or 4-part article about the ineffectual cancer research establishment and how funding only select approaches (basically, the same old ones with substantial support) and overlooking even promising alternatives was spending billions to go in useless circles. They specifically hammered ACS for fostering an in-group attitude that excluded everything except the big-name facilities and researchers who already hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Fast-forward thirty years, and nothing much has changed. Early detection is better, some aspects of care are better… but big C itself is still running the show. And still absorbing billions of dollars a year without real progress.
So if I understand the reply above some cancer have marker on it where drug can bind to it and other not.
Could be why there no cure for motor neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ,MS, Parkinson’s because it has no marker on it .
I know with virus ( HIV and TB) alot of the problem is too many strains and keep mutating.
Cancer and motor neuron disease , amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ,MS, Parkinson is problem with the body own cells so it hard to make drug go after it not do harm to other cells .
I read some time ago about cell signaling and hope to make drugs to block this or disrupt this.
Sorry, but it’s clear that either your understanding of English in general or the technical scientific vocabulary in particular just isn’t good enough to have a discussion of these topics. I’m not going to try again.
Smeghead I think the problem is I’m not grasping what bond ,bind , molecular target ,marker ,target ,protein marker is:o so I may be using it in wrong context some times or getting it mixed up with other words.
And not understanding how drugs work I think is also main problem here.
That’s exactly what I said. Your understanding of the scientific vocabulary is so weak as to make meaningful discussion on the topic unfeasible. I don’t have the time or interest to slowly talk you through a few years’ worth of intro to biology. Therefore I’m bowing out.
Smeghead, FWIW I appreciate the effort you put into your post, which I found very informative.
Regards,
Shodan
As a scientist at a pharma company who is currently having the honor of watching a crazy ass idea I had a few years ago go into the development stage on its way into clinical trials, you are flat out, 100%, wrong. If anything, I’ve been awed by how much I’ve driven all aspects of the project both within the lab and our clinical approach moving forward.
I have no business experience whatsoever, and the science has driven the project from the very beginning and continues to. I can only even name one member of our board of directors off the top of my head.
This little conspiracy theory only makes sense if there is only one company in the entire world who is conspiring to keep diseases from being cured, merely treated. If it’s so easy to cure cancer, then surely you can start a company and do it. I assure you it would be profitable to have a cure for cancer.
I believe we are living at the proverbial ‘dawn of a new era’. In the "war on cancer, there are at least two, novel therapeutic avenues now just coming to fruition.
The first is the use of specific growth factor inhibitors such as the increasingly well known Gleevec (imatinib). These have already ‘cured’ some cancers (or at least put them into sustained, and totally tumor-free remissions). Prototypical examples include their use for certain leukemias and certain stomach cancers.
The second breakthrough area involves using the patient’s own immune system’s ‘fighter’ cells, with the latter having been reprogrammed at the DNA level (through the use of viruses) to fight off the cancer. Coincidentally, there is a terrific article on this approach in yesterday’s New York Times.
Although neither of these two modes of therapy are without potential side effects and toxicity, it is clearly less with them than what people have been enduring until now (NB - some of you may point out the life-threatening reactions suffered by some of the patients treated by immune re-programming as described in the Times article. I chalk that up to inexperience - as time goes on, doses will be adjusted and specific anti-toxicity treatments will be used more routinely, e.g. anti-IL-6.
So, even though we’ve all heard it before, and more than once at that, I really do believe we’re on the cusp of a new era; an era where cancers are routinely “beaten”.