Hi emelle,
Interesting, could be something, but I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it. It doesn’t sound like they have even made it through the animal stage yet. One of the difficulties I think that cancer patients have is that we end up reading so much PR that may be intended for another audience, such as potential investors or whoever else the University of Helsinki is trying to impress (funding bodies? potential medical students? other universities?) I think this press release errs in making it seem like it is just a matter of time before the drug ends up in the pharmacy and it is just not that simple.
To keep things in perspective, I will just quote two experts on scientific innovation, Josh Lerner and Adam Jaffe. The material in brackets is my explanation:
p. 42 ‘Out of 5,000 to 10,000 compounds screened for clinical use [treatment of patients], 250 will possibly merit pre-clinical testing [this is the animal testing phase], five of which will show enough merit for clinical testing [this means human trials]. Of the five drugs subjected to expensive clinical testing, only one will be approved by the FDA.’ (from their book Innovation and Its Discontents, which is on patent law).
So, if something hasn’t been through the animal stage, the odds of it becoming a treatment in the end are only about one in 250. Once I read those figures I stopped paying any attention to anything that hadn’t passed the animal stage since the odds just weren’t good enough.
From what I have heard, the people involved in cancer research don’t expect a cure for another thirty years or so, but I think that some important things have been learned. For example, one of the reasons that cancer treatments haven’t been working is that many cancers involve cancerous stem cells. These are cells that produce other cancerous cells. Unfortunately, many chemos focus on traits that stem cells lack, such as rapid division. Stem cells are not completely untouchable: herceptin can kill off some her2-positive cancerous stem cells (latest estimate 80%), for example, but it requires a completely different way of thinking about treatments.
A big part of the problem with cancer in this country is that medical research in particular and cancer research in particular is not funded in a serious manner. As much as I love CRUK, I don’t think it is right that medical research is so dependent on fun runs, bake sales, charity shops, let alone wills (I know why they do this, but personally I dislike it because I want them to have every incentive to keep me alive). As Lizziecee has often pointed out based on the experience of her nephew, cancer researchers in this country are very poorly paid, which makes it difficult for many bright people to undertake this career if they want to stay in this country. Unfortunately, the lastest move seems to be for the stroke charities and Alzheimer’s charities to point out that they are relatively underfunded compared with cancer, which very well might be considering how much very expensive long term incapacity they cause, but it is a shame that they seek some of cancer’s research funding instead of making the general point that medical research needs more money.
I suppose that the myth that a cure for cancer is just around the corner serves alot of purposes. The medical research community doesn’t have to answer for why there has been so little progress on cancer (high-tech entrepreneurs with cancer in the US have been most effective making this criticism, since their R&D has been more productive). At the same time, it is very comforting for the public.