4 replies to this topic

[CallMeLucky]

This was worth watching.

http://video.cnbc.co...ideo=3000066167

[Tedsey]

Nice to hear that the drug companies are shifting their focus and monies toward cancer.  It is clear that they predict success in this area, if not profit (as one drug works, it may lead to another and another; as long as there are humans on earth, there will be disease).  I just think it is erronious to talk about finding a "cure for cancer".  It is misleading for the media to refer to it as one big disease.  Most of the cancer-free public have no idea.  One cure may or may not lead to a cure for all.  I often think the age old way of "throwing drugs at it" to see which one sticks will die hard.  For example, with the success of TKIs, other researchers are using them to treat other cancers.  But I often wonder if it is with good cause and/or effect (GIST aside).  I guess it is hard for folks in any discipline to forgo the dream of a panacea.  We have to get away from that AND calling cancer one big disease.  Clearly those who suffer understand it is a horse of many different colors, if not a huge stable full of numerous breeds.  Baby boomers aside, kinda sad so many of us got CML so young.  If given the choice, and there was no way around getting leukemia in my lifetime, I would much prefer it after 60.  

But here is to a cure and being alive and well enough to enjoy it for along time,

Teds      

[Happycat]

Teds,

Well, I can tell you why pharma takes a drug used to treat one disease and tests it on another.  It is so expensive to do all the development work, tox studies,etc., that they go test it against other stuff because they've already put so much money into it.  if it takes $500M to get a new drug approved, but only $200M to test an old drug for a new disease, there's definitely a cost advantage to repurposing!

They are also finding that while every cancer is different, they often use many of the same signaling pathways in the body.  So TKIs, Pi3K inhibitors, etc., can inhibit multiple, but  very different cancers.  Still, cancers are tricky little devils, so if you shut down one pathway, they just find another path to go around it.  That's the real challenge that I see.  Darn cancers just keep changing.

Traci

[pamsouth]

Hey Tedsey,

Just a thought to throw out.  Probably doesn't mean anything.  I guess I am a different thinker then most, or maybe just trying to wrap my head around a whole lot of stuff.  After I was Dx with CML july 2005, at age 57 I was told how lucky I was to have been dx with this disease, CM,L at a time when the great Drug Gleevec came out.  After going thru the horrors of side effects and in and out of the hospital for about a year and wondering why it is such a great drug that I am sick everyday, I decided to take the d.. pill go to the doctor have my labs and try to remove it from my mind, and don't complain, and look at my cup as 1/2 full and be grateful that I am alive, in if only 1/2 the quality of life. But then in 2007 having what looked like a perfectly good gall bladder when removed, and told it had no gall stones, the gall bladder just quit working.   I wondered is that linked to  the CML or the Gleevec, or coincidence, but that is another story.

Well I hate to go down this road as it make sound a bit ungrateful for the newer drugs that our helping many people.  I can remember at diagnoses, the doctors saying isn't it great that Gleevec only target the bad cell and not the good cell, comparing it to the IV Chemo INfusion kill the good and bad cell.  But I kept wonder why do I have this long list of side effects.  Why is my face moon shaped, My eyes are so swollen I can barely see, I have brain fog, my equal liberian is off, i vomit all the time, etc.  I am in out of the hospitals with low cells and a fever.  I kept saying how is this so great. Only targets bad cells, only 1 cancer while others have mulitiple cancer because of the other med's they take for one doctor.  I did hear with my own ears an expert oncology address that issue at a seminar last year in Indianapolis Indiana.  This woman had 4 different cancers each one from the drugs administered for a previous cancer.

Of course many of those things, side effects, have subside over time and I would prefer to stay on Gleevec then the risk of another happy TKI drug that is unbeknown to my body.

Sorry to seem ungrateful, but I really felt lied to, & misled.  Yep 6 years later and I am still alive but I do still live with a much lesser quality of life, but again that sounds so ungrateful.  I guess I was a dreamer thinking I was promised a cure, just around the corner. A friend of mine was promised a cure by MD Anderson Houston Tx 16 years ago, she calls them ever year and ask questions and say well 16 years later and I am still waiting, since then she has had breast cancer and a mastectomy, was that from the drugs, I don't know? .  And now on this video we are promised another cure.  It seems to me a lifetime of expensive drugs for the very young to look forward to.  At least I was 57 when diagnosed I would hate to be in my twenties or even be younger and look to a life time of drugs.

Sorry for being so negative.  Cure??

Pam South

[Judy2]

Hi Pam South,

I feel the same way you do. Yes, of course I am grateful for these drugs but they do not come without a price, both figuratively and literally. 200mg Gleevec did not do the trick for me, 300mg Gleevec made be nauseous, dizzy, I had fluid retention, seborrhea and my arthritic symptoms came back. My Tasigna rash was so bad that my chin and the area between my eyebrows were swollen. So now I'm on to Sprycel, just hoping the side effects won't be too bad, I'm running out of options. It's not just about living, it's about living a good life.

Judy