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>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 res
by 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 agoThe 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.