Dear all,
Modern cancer treatments and immunotherapies costs can easily top $1,000,000 per patient because of cumbersome, expensive manufacturing and patents. The success rate of, say, CAR-T cell therapies is about 20% and often relapse occurs due to evolution of cancer on cell level. The cancer incidence is on the rise mainly due to the ageing population. Do you think that sooner or later, government-funded cancer treatments would become unavailable due to their burden on the economy and euthanasia would become the only option for patients who cannot afford private healthcare? I do not want to sound pessimistic, but how likely would that situation become real?
Dear Maria!
I have an optimistic approach to the issues you raised. Today, more effective (up to 97%) and less expensive technologies (10 times) than CAR T-cells have appeared on the market. The human body itself suggests in which direction to go - not to destroy atypical cells and the whole body with chemotherapy, but to help it by eliminating the immune deficiency - the cause of cancer. We are on the verge of a new alternative concept - controlled correction of immunity in vivo. Strong immunity is able to eliminate cancer - this is axiom that does not need to be proven.
Best regards,
professor Andrei Ostanin
Most new therapies actually emerged from government/taxpayer funded academic research institutions. The problem with cancer research funding, is the people on the funding committees are also funding recipients and members of various self serving groups, developing similar trendy therapies. They'll start their grant application with a blanket incorrect statement such as 'Chemotherapy is non-selective and kills all rapidly replicating cells. When they review the grants of others containing the word 'chemotherapy' the grant is canned without them even reading the proposal. This way they can remove funding competition, and make short work, of their paid per grant, reviewing chore. If something from, the biased funded, academic arena does appear to be promising, these researchers often start a small company to test the idea and develop the product. If/when it appears successful a large pharmaceutical company will swoop in and buy/absorb the company. They will develop the product and blame much of the high price on the drug development costs, that the tax payer actually paid. I have been present a scientific advisor board meetings where they graded anticancer drugs based on potential earning potential rather than efficacy.
I and some of my colleagues couldn't get the below approach funded (which likely most of the reviewers couldn't even follow) and their proposal destroying review, was basically chemotherapy has been used since the 1950s, it is non-selective, largely ineffective, and highly toxic.... we need to move on. Perhaps if we get AI reviewers we'd get better results.
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