Word: cancerous
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...cancer isn't one disease; it's dozens of them, each with different mechanisms that make the fight diabolically difficult. The most pernicious forms of cancer--among them, pancreatic, lung and brain--are still nearly invincible. Survival rates in rare forms of cancer aren't budging much, either. And the cancer arsenal is still heavy on the blunderbuss--blasting the body with harsh chemotherapy and radiation that take a huge toll on healthy as well as diseased tissue. Nor has the national health-care system done a great job of prevention and early detection. Worst of all, many people...
Aren't we making a lot of progress? Absolutely. In a lot of places. When you adjust for age (since cancer is over-represented in the elderly), fewer people are getting cancer, and those who get it are surviving longer. We are benefiting from improved surgical techniques as well as more refined chemotherapies and radiation strategies that use lasers and robots to target cancer cells. Cracking the genomic code is leading to new drugs, geared to individual dna, that disrupt the very mechanism of cancer. "The rate of discovery has been phenomenal," says Dr. Harold Varmus, CEO of Memorial Sloan...
...that cancer research funded by NIH/NCI or Big Pharma is somehow second-rate. "The last 30 or so years of concerted effort have led to a tremendously rich understanding. This is not a waste of time," says Jacks...
...have to write grant proposals that demonstrate a reasonable expectation of success. "You have to have already done some of the stuff and then propose it, before they're going to believe it's the right thing to do," says Dr. Ray DuBois, executive vice president of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and a cancer researcher. A proposal can take months to write, so a rejection means the loss of a scientist's productivity as well...
...also mean that "lesser" cancers don't get as much attention. M.D. Anderson has a project to map the entire bladder-cancer genome. "It's not something that NIH is interested in because it's a little less common than other cancers," says DuBois. Using other funds, researchers identified a gene defect that correlates smoking and bladder cancer. "If you have that defect and you smoke, there's a 100% chance you'll get cancer," says DuBois. But the hospital is more likely to get support for work on lung cancer, a much bigger problem. So call it research triage...