Home > Work > The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
1 " We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. "
― , The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
2 " We should not be aiming for weeks of improved survival. Our goals should be higher. The public needs to see how far we have drifted from the original aims as oncologists and researchers and at what cost to the patient. "
3 " To begin the ending, we must end the beginning. Prevention will be the only compassionate, universally applicable cure. It is not prevention through lifestyle changes. Individuals with pristine eating and exercising habits get cancer because cancer-causing mutations accumulate as natural consequences of reproduction and aging of cells. The new strategy must go beyond early detection as practiced currently through mammograms and other routine screening tests. The prevention I am talking about is through identification and eradication of transformed cancerous cells at their inception, before they have had a chance to organize into a bona fide malignant, incurable disease. This may seem an unattainable, utopian dream, but it is achievable in a reasonable time. We are already using sophisticated technology to detect the residues of disease that linger after treatment, the last cancer cell. Can we not reverse the order of things and use the tests to detect the first? "
4 " There is one and only one goal for all of us—to ensure that all our intellectual efforts are directed toward the relief of humanity’s suffering. "
5 " The vast majority of researchers are studying diseases they never see, in animals who don’t get them spontaneously, or in test tubes where the “cancer” must be artificially created and maintained. "
6 " I cannot stress this enough times; scientists need to stop making more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits. No one, however, willingly surrenders their pet projects, no matter how far they have drifted from the original intent, as long as they can maintain their grip on grants and power. "
7 " Humans do not benefit but are harmed by misleading animal testing, especially when it comes to predicting the efficacy of targeted therapies. "
8 " my own medical perspective is that animal cancer research should be regarded as the scientific equivalent of gossip—with about the same chance of turning out to be true, i.e. truly effective in humans. Some gossip turns out to be true, but most of it does not… and gossip can cause great anguish for those affected, in this case millions of desperate cancer patients worldwide.” He was right. "
9 " A scientist can become consumed by devotion to facts without caring about what their value is to humanity. "
10 " Abbas, if one day, the sun rose in the west, practically the whole world would stop and stare. But there is a handful of people who watched it rise in the east every day and wondered why. These are the people who change the world. "
11 " CAR-T therapy in a very small subset of cancer patients with lymphoid disease is fantastically successful, albeit causing severe short-term toxicities and many known and unknown lifelong side effects. It is clear that much work lies ahead before this strategy can be scaled up for general use. Yet the hype surrounding CAR-T is such that practically every patient questions me about why they are being deprived of the magic cure. The results are not always magical: Despite high-target, cell-specific killing in vitro and encouraging preclinical efficacies in murine tumor models, clinical responses of adoptively transferred T cells expressing α-folate receptor (FR) specific CAR in ovarian cancer were disappointing. No reduction of tumor burden was seen in the 14 patients studied. The absence of efficacy was ascribed to lack of specific trafficking of the T cells to tumor and short persistence of the transferred T cells. "
12 " according to a report in Nature on the study, researchers at the NCI concluded that other compounds that might work in humans were never tested on the erroneous belief that if they couldn’t help PDX mice, they couldn’t help humans either. "
13 " But from my perspective, even if the models worked as well as we had hoped they would, the fundamental problem would still remain—very few effective anticancer treatments exist, so the predictions made through these models are more likely to be useful in what to avoid rather than what to give the patient. I cannot stress this enough times; scientists need to stop making "
14 " more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits. "
15 " Treating cancer as one disease is like treating Africa as one country. "
16 " For the next quantum leap, fundamentally different strategies have to be developed. The two immediate steps should be a shift from studying animals to studying humans and a shift from chasing after the last cancer cell to developing the means to detect the first cancer cell. "
