3 ms·

I'm skeptical it's as bad as that. We classify cancers by the type of cell that went bad, i.e. lung cancer if it occurs in the lung, liver cancer if it occurs

by tsotha 11y ago

I'm skeptical it's as bad as that. We classify cancers by the type of cell that went bad, i.e. lung cancer if it occurs in the lung, liver cancer if it occurs in the liver, brain cancer if it occurs in the brain, etc. But you can have, say, lung and liver cancers that result from the same mutation, and there's a chance, at least, they'll respond to the same therapy. And sometimes there are other diseases caused by problems in whatever pathway you're messing with. Tamoxifen, for example, can be used to treat two relatively rare non-cancer diseases.

danieltillett 11y ago
Classify cancers by the tissue origin is only of partial help in treating. A cancer may arise in the liver, but be totally refractory to one treatment, but respond to another. One way to workout how many different cancers there are when classified by treatment response is to look at the true cure rate to when a cancer is treated using a treatment. Since the treatments we have are biased in targeting the most common sub-types this can only give us a lower bound, but even this number is huge since the cancer cure rate is not that high for the most common cancers (I am not talking about 5 year survival, but real cure). My rough guess is there are 10,000s of different cancers when classified by treatment response.
- tsotha 11y ago
  >Classify cancers by the tissue origin is only of partial help in treating. A cancer may arise in the liver, but be totally refractory to one treatment, but respond to another. Well, sure. That's my point, though. Cancers that arise indifferent parts of the body may be treatable with the same drug. >One way to workout how many different cancers there are when classified by treatment response is to look at the true cure rate to when a cancer is treated using a treatment. That's the current situation as it stands today. It's not necessarily what we'll see in five or ten years.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    The problem is that we don’t have the range of treatment types to target all the the different mutation types. Most of the drugs we have target the same basic pathways like DNA damage repair - we have dozens of these drugs, but very few targeting specific mutations. We need a lot more diversity of action in our drugs if we have a chance to cure cancer. Having said this the most hopeful area is the immunotherapies. Scaled out to their full potential we could have a very powerful set of drugs to go after the cancer diversity problem.

by tsotha 11y ago

danieltillett 11y ago

Classify cancers by the tissue origin is only of partial help in treating. A cancer may arise in the liver, but be totally refractory to one treatment, but respond to another. One way to workout how many different cancers there are when classified by treatment response is to look at the true cure rate to when a cancer is treated using a treatment. Since the treatments we have are biased in targeting the most common sub-types this can only give us a lower bound, but even this number is huge since the cancer cure rate is not that high for the most common cancers (I am not talking about 5 year survival, but real cure). My rough guess is there are 10,000s of different cancers when classified by treatment response.

tsotha 11y ago
>Classify cancers by the tissue origin is only of partial help in treating. A cancer may arise in the liver, but be totally refractory to one treatment, but respond to another. Well, sure. That's my point, though. Cancers that arise indifferent parts of the body may be treatable with the same drug. >One way to workout how many different cancers there are when classified by treatment response is to look at the true cure rate to when a cancer is treated using a treatment. That's the current situation as it stands today. It's not necessarily what we'll see in five or ten years.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  The problem is that we don’t have the range of treatment types to target all the the different mutation types. Most of the drugs we have target the same basic pathways like DNA damage repair - we have dozens of these drugs, but very few targeting specific mutations. We need a lot more diversity of action in our drugs if we have a chance to cure cancer. Having said this the most hopeful area is the immunotherapies. Scaled out to their full potential we could have a very powerful set of drugs to go after the cancer diversity problem.