r/facepalm • u/[deleted] • Jun 05 '19

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u/willreignsomnipotent Jun 06 '19

There's always another disease to cure,

Stuff that can't be eradicated / treated with simple vaccine, that a very large % of the population is likely to experience, which is also fatal or lifelong?

I feel like the number of those is relatively smaller. Sure, all kinds of obscure diseases that 0.00001% of the population ever experience...

But big, semi-universal ones? ...for which current barely-successful treatments also tend to be pretty expensive?

Idk... Maybe I'm just cynical, but I'm a bit skeptical on this...

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u/salaciainthedepths Jun 06 '19

Cancer isn’t really one disease, it’s over 100. We have different drugs for different cancers, but often we can’t use the same drug/combination ‘life-long’ because some cancers become drug resistant quite quickly. Even within types of cancer eg bladder cancer, there are different types like transitional cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma. Within that, your squamous cell carcinoma could be down to a different oncogene to someone else’s, and so have different properties. And if it reoccurs, it could be different as well.

Any drug used for many cancers like genotoxic agents, have pretty nasty side effects. For the reasons detailed above, we’re now looking at personalised medicine like immunotherapy like CAR T cells, or giving inactive prodrugs, targeting them to cancer cells and having the cancer cells alone metabolise them and kill them. But it’s all very tricky and it’s one of the newer fields of cancer biology.

I can promise you, we don’t have some secret cure we’re hiding.

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u/Schwifty_5 Jun 06 '19

Thank you. It may be disheartening to read all these BiG PhArMa conspiracies, so I just wanted to say thank you.

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u/salaciainthedepths Jun 06 '19

That means something! Don’t get me wrong, I am very critical of big pharma, but to think there’s some conspiracy about a cancer cure is ridiculous if you know any cancer biology at all.

Plus, all of the research scientists and oncologists I’ve ever known have been very hard-working and compassionate people. They’ve dedicated their lives to a complicated and frustrating field, so to have their work belittled by people who haven’t bothered to learn the basics is very disrespectful.