This
year, scientists have been attempting to create a medication that will
ultimately “fool” cancer cells. It is considered precision medicine and it uses
“cancer’s molecular underpinnings to develop drugs that attack the genes or
gene products that make up cancer’s factory while sparing normal cells.” There
have been many experiments conducted in hopes of finding a way to cure cancer,
once and for all.
The first study is done on 600
patients with one of two bone marrow cancers, myelodysplastic
syndromes or acute myeloid leukemia
at the Cleveland Clinic. These cancers are most commonly found in
people age 70 to 80 and can be fatal if left untreated. These cancers cause cells to outgrow and form
a mass of cells or remain immature making it nearly impossible to function
normally. Majority of the patients
tested developed an average of 10 genetic mutations before the cancers were
diagnosed. The fact that so many
mutations were present makes treating cancer that much harder. There is no medication available to treat
that many mutations and only treating a few of them would help the rest of them
thrive allowing the treated cancer to regrow.
The
next step in this research is to determine where the mutations start and which
one they start with. But it is possible that these starter mutations are found
in both cancerous and noncancerous cells so attempting to kill them could wreak
havoc within the patients. A drug was
administered to patients that would hopefully improve their blood count and
attack the mutations in cancerous cells.
But for some patients, the mutation had nothing to do with causing the
cancer. Despite everything, the road to
curing cancer has had massive improvements but nothing is curative. And although many new forms of treatment have
come into play, the older techniques are not a thing of the past.
Cancer
has always been a topic of interest for me just because of how unpredictable it
is. It is a brilliant idea that
scientists and researchers are continuing to try to find new ways to treat
cancer in hopes of one day curing it for good.
Chemotherapy and modern medicine are good cancer treatments but they do
not always work so the continued research for a drug that could pinpoint the
mutations and destroy them at the source could only help pave the way to a
cancer free world.
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