StemCell Therapy

Chances are, you or a loved one will develop cancer at some point during your lives. Worldwide, cancer is one of the leading causes of death, with one in six deaths attributable to the disease. There were over 8.8 million cancer-related deaths in 2015 alone, and the number of new cancer cases each year tallies in the tens of millions.

We have state-of-the-art facilities to treat cancer, such as the Rush University Cancer Center in Chicago, which specializes in oncology research, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which ranks as one of the best treatment centers in the United States. Were also funneling millions of dollars into cancer research, and have known about the disease in some capacity since the days of Hippocrates, stretching back 2300 years.

In that time, weve identified and cured countless diseases with much lower risks and mortality rates, so why havent we been able to eradicate cancer yet?

There are several reasons why cancer remains such an elusive disease:

1. There are many types of cancer.

First off, cancer isnt a disease; its a collective term for hundreds of diseases. Lung cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer, for example, all have different risk factors, pathologies, and symptoms, and must be treated very differently. Even within one branch of cancer, there can be dozens to hundreds of different variants. For example, cancer cells are categorized, and certain types (such as cancer stem cells) can transform into further different types. This makes it nearly impossible to comprehensively study cancer as a whole. Instead, we must divide our focus to each individual iteration of the disease, and attempt to solve those problems one at a time.

2. Carcinogenesis is ridiculously complex.

Carcinogenesis, the mutation of otherwise healthy cells into cancer cells, is an enormously complicated process. Theres no simple trigger point that converts a healthy cell into a cancer cell; even the earliest estimations of the process reduced it to no fewer than six individual steps. Today, thanks to advanced computer models, we know there are hundreds to thousands of different genes collectively responsible for that conversion process, making it extraordinarily hard to understand, prevent, and/or reverse.

3. Cancer is produced from the bodys own cells.

Its also important to remember that cancer comes from the bodys own cells. Cancerous cells are still part of youtherefore, they are exceedingly hard to target without also targeting other parts of you. Cancer treatments often focus on trying to destroy cancer cells, but in the process, this approach can do more harm than good. The bodys immune system is unable to identify and fight cancer on its own (in many cases), though recent progress has been made in attempting to use the immune system against cancer.

4. Theres no virus or bacteria to target.

Cures and treatments for conventional diseases focus on targeting and exploiting a structural weakness in the prime cause for the disease. For example, with bacterial infections, most antibiotics attempt to puncture the cells lining to kill the bacterial cell. Since cancer cells arent easy to destroy, and dont share qualities with killable bacteria or viruses, its hard to come up with a treatment that eradicates the disease entirely.

5. Individuals respond differently to different treatments.

There are dozens of different cancer treatments already, including radiation therapy, chemotherapy, surgeries, immunotherapy, and stem cell therapy. However, these treatments may have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of tolerance, depending on the individual responding to them. When researchers discover a new potential treatment for a specific type of cancer, it may only be applicable to a portion of cancer sufferers.

Because these factors cant be addressed with simple advancements in technology, and because we cant change the nature of cancer, its impossible to ever develop a once-size-fits-all cure for cancerat least not in the conventional sense.

Is this reason to despair? Not necessarily. Instead of pooling our efforts to curing cancer, were focusing on treating cancer. Were developing technology that can mitigate the pain and weakness associated with the disease, were inventing new treatment options that can potentially help more individuals, and were finding new ways to eradicate certain manifestations of the disease.

Cancer mortality rates are falling and life expectancies are risingand thats the best we can hope for.

Read the rest here:
Why Don't We Have the Technology to Cure Cancer Yet? - Huffington post (press release) (blog)

This entry was posted on May 10, 2017 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Death by Stem Cells. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |