You long post above was explaining how drugs are made and why it hard to make drug to fight cancer . I think I understand that but what I think I’m getting confused is how drugs work.I know it may take too long to explain bond ,bind , molecular target ,marker ,target ,protein marker 
o:o but may be a post on **how drugs work **and any scientific vocabulary I can than look it up in wikipedia .
Is the war on cancer an ‘utter failure’?: A sobering look at how billions in research money is spent
Drugs work in a myriad way by influencing the incredibly complex biological machine that is a living organism. If you want to learn it by wikipedia I suggest you start with this simple drug and come back to the good experts here (of which I’m not one) when you’ve understood how it works: Mechanism of action of aspirin - Wikipedia
Thanks Smeghead,
My science isn’t strong enough to follow all of that either, but it was helpful.
Sweat - I think one of the things to always remember is that “the less you know about something, the easier it seems to be - the more you know about something, the more you recognize all the stuff you don’t know.” That holds true for pretty much anything in life - my personal favorite is raising kids - everyone thinks its going to be a lot easier than it is - people who are still without children saying “my children will never…”
Yes I don’t really understand how drugs work.
I was talking to buddy of mind on this subject I said ( How does cancer drugs know how to target cancer cells and not normal cells? )
And answers was they don’t that why people get sick and hair falls out and get very tired , weak and vomit a lot.
I looked up some info on the internet.
http://www.webmd.com/cancer/questions-answers-chemotherapy
Most drugs have side effects.
I think I got confused reading articles they hope in the future drugs will get better and have target drugs.
I think I’m confused thinking problem x has marker on it so drug makers make a drug that binds to it o:o:oand problem x is gone !!! and that not how drugs work .I think I got confused with they hope future drugs will work like that. So called target drugs.
That will explain why all drugs today have side effects.
So hard for drug makers to make drugs to do its job plus not do harm to body and keep the side effects low .
Where in future they hope for target drugs.
I think the problem you are having is confusing tumor cells with bacteria. Bacteria may as well be little aliens, so finding ways to target bacterial proteins or processes that don’t affect mammalian cells is relatively simple, and it’s therefore easier to develop novel antibiotics.
Tumors are your cells. They don’t make new proteins*, they’ve just disregulated the proteins that normal cells make, and co-opted normal cell processes to become a mass of cells that is no longer contact sensitive and is capable of spreading. They don’t have any proteins that are unique, so targeting tumor cells invariably targets normal cells as well; the hope is to target the tumor cells more than normal cells. The best you can hope for is to find proteins that are expressed higher (tumor antigens) or pathways that tumors require but are dispensable for normal cells that can be inhibited.
But, yes, it is easy to “target” proteins as you describe here. I can make you a targeted drug to any protein you want, and it would only take about two months to do. But, that’s the easy part.
*this is not 100% true (BCR-abl), but this is still just a fusion protein of two normal human proteins.
I think the fact that many doctors and nurses who develop later stage cancer opt out of treatment tells me all I need to know.
I had a friend who was an RN whose breast cancer metastasized to her liver. She spent the last months of her life hiding from all her medical friends, more afraid of being taken to the hospital than she was of dying of cancer.
I think it is important to emphasize the phrase “later stage” in your quote above.
What can happen, unfortunately, is that some people forget the “later stage” bit and decline treatment from the outset; or at least decline conventional treatment. And that is a shame because, the horror stories of cancer therapy notwithstanding, effective (and relatively non-toxic) treatment is available for many cancers.
There is no straightforward, single answer to this. Different drugs work in different ways.
I’d like to see more than an anecdotal source for this claim (based on what I see regarding my medical colleagues, it is untrue).
As Karl notes, it may partly depend on what one means by “later stage cancer”. If we’re talking about end-stage incurable disease, I suspect many medical professionals would opt for quality of life-sustaining***/hospice care rather than expending their last months on futile efforts. But that goes for non-physicians/nurses too.
I bristle when I hear this business of “doctors won’t subject themselves to cancer treatments”, partly because my father (a retired physician) gained several good years after his diagnosis of metastatic prostate carcinoma through mainstream treatment (before dying of something else). There is also a popular meme on alternative medicine websites about how a survey showed that physicians wouldn’t accept chemotherapy for themselves. What they fail to mention is that the survey was done a long time ago (1985) and involved a new (for the time) drug, cisplatin - moreover, the survey question involved using the drug for incurable non-small cell lung cancer. As you can see, there is evidence most physicians now would opt for chemotherapy for lung cancer, even if metastatic disease was present.
***what people often don’t realize is that some effects of progressive cancer are worse than drug side effects - for instance, gastrointestinal/biliary/urinary blockages by tumor or intractable cancer pain. When drugs and other treatments can alleviate these symptoms and make patients’ final days reasonably comfortable, I don’t think we can call this aspect of cancer therapy a failure.
As usual, there’s an xkcd for every subject.
While this is true, I would point out that the article linked in the OP is somewhat poorly written. The title of the article asks if the “war on cancer” is an" utter failure", but the only quote in the article that uses that phrase is specifically referring to metastatic cancers.
I’m a nursing student and I’ve taken an extra elective course just about oncology, and I think that the general public really doesn’t understand how difficult if not impossible it is to “cure” cancer once it metastasizes.
Definitely. Palliative chemo, radiation or even surgery can do a lot to improve quality of life for incurable cancer. As a personal example, my grandfather had metastatic lung cancer, and he received palliative radiation. There were some side effects, but it was worth it for him.
Sorry I made you bristle, Jackmanii. The discussion of cancer can be personal for many of us.
The information I gave - that many doctors and nurses choose to opt out of later stage treatment is a fair one to make, I think.
I worked for two different hospitals before I retired - one public and another private. And there were a number of services that we provided that, in private conversation over coffee, we would discuss and question whether we’d be willing to go that far.
I think many medical staff are aware of the choice between side effects and the pain of terminal cancer and make decisions about that. My friend had some assistance from a doctor friend of hers in her later days.
I’ve read various similar articles over the years .supporting my opinion. A recent one is in The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 25, 2012.“Why Doctors Die Differently. . .”
I read the article. It provides an anecdote about a doctor who supposedly refused treatment for pancreatic cancer, and another anecdote about a non-doctor who refused treatment for metastatic lung cancer. It claims (without supporting evidence) that doctors are more likely to refuse CPR than the rest of the population. The only documentation I see in the article is a reference to a study that indicates doctors are more likely to have written advance directives for health care (which typically cover such things as aggressive end-of-life interventions like mechanical respiration, and not whether to initiate cancer therapy).
Added note: citing a study showing docs are more likely to prepare advanced directives suggests they may well include limitations on initiating CPR (code blue procedures). That’s still a far cry from demonstrating that they avoid cancer therapy.
The problem I have with this theory or the discounted theory that companies are suppressing a car that gets 200mpg is “Why?” A cancer cure drug would be worth billions…maybe even trillions. Even if we agree that big drug companies are money grubbing whores, then we can agree that money grubbing whores like…money. The person who invents a cancer cure’s great-grand children would never have to work.
The theory that they are suppressing it because it’s “more profitable” to keep stringing along half-ass therapies doesn’t take into account the number of people and/or insurance companies that would very nearly literally pay any price for a real cure–see how AIDS drugs get priced, for example.
Yeah, unless the inventor blows the whole wad on expensive hookers and Vegas gambling trips.
Jackmanii, I speent some time looking at facts and figures this morning. Nearly all the sites that quote the disinterest in chemotherapy by medical personnel look like alternative medicine sites. And I understand a little better where you are coming from
I think that it is unfortunate to make the issue into an either/or situation but I do see the problems with alternative medicines sometimes unrealistic and potentially dishonest stance.
Medicine, practiced well, is both a science and an art I believe. And a good doctor (That should probably read a seasoned doctor) certainly knows from experience that the enemy is not death, but rather poor quality of life.
It’s a fine line and involves a number of factors including age, family members, and patient’s wishes. I’d like to believe that all doctors acquiese to these things rather than persdonsl power and income. But realistically it’s not always true.
Would that everyone be are trusting in modern medicine and as fortunate as your father.
My father wasn’t “trusting”. He was knowledgeable and realistic enough to know what medicine likely could and couldn’t do for him. Relieving back pain and prolonging life from metastatic prostate carcinoma was something he knew medicine could accomplish.
When he had his last, sudden illness he chose to die at home with his family around him, as final heroic efforts often don’t do much other than prolong misery.
I think that is where medical professionals have the upper hand. When my brother in law was dying, he and the family wasn’t equipped to really understand or weigh their options. So when his kidneys started failing, they chose a perc nef (?), a choice that had the nurses and doctors on my side of the family shaking their heads. The cancer was in his lungs, he had persistent pneumonia. And kidney failure, my nurse heavy family knew, is a more pleasant death than the suffocation that can come at the end of tumors in the lungs. My in laws didn’t understand that they were being given an opportunity to choose a death, one a little sooner, but with less struggle.
Not sure where Smeghead is but if Smeghead is in school he is probably really busy with school work. I think that is what Smeghead was trying to explain.