Just curious. So many billions are spent on them and new treatments and cocktails are making them more livable, but I was wondering if any have a possible cure (or even vaccine) in sight.
What does this mean?
Lots of diseases have vaccines and cures. Do you mean things like cancers and auto-immune disorders?
At any given time, there are probably a dozen different possible cures for cancer in sight. Obviously, most of them don’t work out, or work for only a limited subset of cancers, or are only a better treatment, not a full cure.
Then again, asking for a single Cure for Cancer is a bit unrealistic. With those cancers we can cure, when it happens, it’s usually a result of many different treatments being used together (for instance, surgery to remove the main tumor, and a combination of chemo and radiation to kill off the remnants).
I suspect that most diseases are in the same situation: Many potential treatments, some of which may work out, and some combination of which might constitute a cure.
I am not really sure what the question means either. True influenza can be deadly serious but flu shots do a good job most years of stopping the disease in its tracks for the most vulnerable population that decides to get the shot. The same was true for polio. Smallpox was a horrible disease but has all but completely been eradicated in the world but I don’t know if that counts as a cure. HIV and AIDS don’t have to be a death sentence for everyone that has them these days but patients have to stay on the best drugs available for life. The same holds true for many mental illnesses and conditions like diabetes.
Your question hints at some odd gray area and I can’t figure out what that is.
I’m asking, is there anything like the polio vaccine or a smallpox cure on the horizon: something that will make a particular disease that currently kills or lessens the life of many people, either disappear altogether in a few years or, like polio, afflict the lives of only a tiny fraction of the number previously affected. What diseases stand the greatest likelihood of essentially disappearing during our lifetimes?
I think you’re wondering about diseases which are primarily a manifestation of genetic expression, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases, as opposed to diseases caused by an external pathogen. You just didn’t quite phrase it the way you intended. You’re asking because we’ve made astounding progress in treating infectious diseases, but when our DNA goes haywire, there’s still not very much we can do about it, and you want to know when that will change.
I feel that we’re going to start seeing some really amazing stuff coming down the pike in about 30 or 40 years, but that’s based more on faith and intuition than any real inside knowledge.
They have found a drug that may correct the cellular defect of one of the specific subtypes of CF, one which affects about 10% of CF patients. Human trials are ongoing, and the early results look quite promising.
Unfortunately, it’s not the subtype of CF my daughter has, but it could be helpful there, too.
Here’s an oral report on cancer vaccines that I wrote recently for a class assignment. It is an extremely simplistic treatment of the subject; my target audience was composed entirely of people with high school educations. However, it demonstrates that we’re finally starting to break the bonds of chemo and surgery when it comes to treating cancer.
Among others TB, polio, malaria, and leprosy could be wiped out in our lifetime, but the problem is not lack of a cure per se. What is primarily missing is the political will, organisation, money, and political stability in the most virulent areas that these diseases still affect.
There was a man on NewsHour tonight talking about how incidence of the most studied cancers has been falling due to screening for precancerous conditions & treatment of same. And we’re getting better at treating them once they develop. A lot fewer women dying of breast cancer now. So…make of that what you will.
Damn good question. Apparently, nothing has been cured recently, and the only answer is “I don’t understand the question,” or “redefine the question,” or “we have treatments.”
Not seeing much cure.
I’m just blue-skying here, but it’s possible that we’ve achieved some kind of plateau with current technology and some breakthrough like gene splicing or stem cells that constitues a new approach is needed before we see a slew of cures. Currently a great deal of our treatments boil down to surgery or medications, which mostly won’t cure genetic diseases, congenital abnormalities or autoimmune diseases, which I think cause a lot of current misery. Again, I’m shooting from the hip here.
In less than 50 years I believe they will be laughing at us for the use of Chemotherapy, What an awful treatment. It will go in the ranks of humors and excessive leaching and
bleeding.
There’s a LOT of good stuff going on with CF right now. They’re really making progress understanding exactly what’s going on in the cells and how to make real, significant changes in patients’ lives. The pipeline is pretty darned full.
One possibility for my PhD project would be the creation of a new cholera vaccine. I don’t think I’ll be going that way, but the professor in question has a good strategy and funding in place for its creation. No guarantees, of course…
I’ll take that bet
There are a number of bacterial infections that are on the verge of becoming incurable. There are new antibiotics on the horizon, but they are a ways off. Most of the new antibiotics are just new versions of the older classes, so a resistant strain is likely to be resistant to the new antibiotics.
Well, that depends. Will they still be using the same chemo drugs we’re using now? Almost certainly not. Will they still be using targeted poisons? Almost certainly. Except the targeted poisons they use will probably be custom-sculpted for cancer cell membrane receptors and laser-guided to the site.
I’d like to think we’ll see some progress with Alzheimer’s. It is certainly seen as a druggable disease, pharma companies are working on Alzheimer’s targets at the moment. We’ll have to see if they pan out, but there is constant research being carried out that suggests that there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
Breakthrough in disease treatment is driven to a large extent by the profit motive. Pharma companies are not interested in researching diseases whose treatments cannot make money. Research into cancer, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular, CNS disorders, obesity etc will benefit from the full beam of human knowledge and innovation. Tropical diseases such as malaria, Leishmania, Chagas disease languish, relatively speaking.
It’s not a done deal, but guinea worm disease could be wiped out within the next few years:
No they won’t laugh at us, any more than we laugh at doctors who tried to treat tuberculosis before antibiotics.
Yes, chemotherapy is a pretty brutal treatment with horrible side effects, but it actually works to kill cancer cells. If you’ve got an idea for treating cancer that doesn’t cause the horrible side effects of chemotherapy then go ahead and propose it.
Maybe someday we’ll have a treatment that cures cancer as simply as antibiotics cure tuberculosis. But until/unless we get that treatment we’re left to struggle with the treatments we have.