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How would you consider a drug that cures 5% of cancers a "game changer"? Do you know what a game changer is? Hint: It means the game changes. In this case it w
by feelix 10y ago
How would you consider a drug that cures 5% of cancers a "game changer"?
Do you know what a game changer is? Hint: It means the game changes. In this case it would mean that cancer is at least 50% obviated.
- danieltillett 10y agoThe reason it is a game changer in we are now trying to cure not just increase survival. Once you have a method that can cure people with advanced cancers that all other treatments types fail on you have a game changer.
- feelix 10y agoI'd certainly like to think that's the case, although unfortunately it does not seem to be. If you read the article I posted in my initial comment, for example, it seems like this involves value combined with PR BS. If you think that's not the case and it truly is a game changer please do share why
- danieltillett 10y agoThe immunological drugs really are game changers. Up until now we have had three basic ways of treating cancer: cut, irradiate or poison. These basically never work on advanced cancers, or cancers that come back after initial treatment. The immunological drugs turn the immune system against the cancer and this approach can cure cancers that are untreatable using other methods. It is still really early days, but the immunological drugs are able to take patients that are weeks from death, and for which everything else has failed, and cure them. What we really need to know if why it does not work for everyone, but it provides a crack into which we can hammer a wedge.
- feelix 10y agoIndeed the class of immunological drugs look like they could be a game changer at some point in the future. However the question is around the use of the term for this specific drug right now.
- danieltillett 10y agoWell this drug is curing people with terminal cancers - something we have not ever been able to do before. Game changer does not have to mean we have perfection, just the previous approach is no longer valid and we are tackling the problem in a new way. In the field, immunological drugs have given investigators hope that we know that cancer is able to be cured and we now just have to figure out the best way to do it - in the past we really didn’t have an approach that had a chance of making cancer a curable disease. Sure there were some approaches that might work on some cancers or some approaches that would hold the cancer at bay for a time, but nothing that gave hope of general cure. To put it more succinctly, terminal is no longer terminal.