Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Trying to fool cancer



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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