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One of the heroes of the article explained how his team discovered the first drug to prolong survival in advanced melanoma patients: The discoveries that led t
by WhitneyLand 10y ago
One of the heroes of the article explained how his team discovered the first drug to prolong survival in advanced melanoma patients:
The discoveries that led to the drug, Dr. Allison said, came entirely from years of basic research in immunology — experiments in test tubes and mice — and not from the clinical or “translational” science, aimed at moving rapidly into humans, that is so heavily favored now by institutions that pay for studies.
“None of this came from cancer research, none,” Dr. Allison said, adding that without support for basic research, “progress, if any, will be incremental, not a big leap.”
- jessriedel 10y agoI keep getting hints that there is some fight behind the scenes in US biology over how much money should be devoted to exploratory vs translational research. Comments like these pretend as if this wasn't a difficult trade off, that we need a huge shift in one direction, and that this direction is so obviously better we don't even need to discuss the relative amounts involved.
- eru 10y agoAren't we doing that already? Just the rhetoric has changed: we just dress up all our basic science as being about cancer.