Good News About Chemotherapy
Chemo's dirty secret is that many patients, oftentimes most, will be made wretchedly sick yet receive no benefit in the bargain - they won't even be playing the remission lottery. That's because cancer isn't one disease called "cancer". It's a highly individualized disease. Yet because until now no one could identify who would respond to what everybody with a given type of cancer got whatever worked best for the most people.
Now, efforts at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to identify biomakers that refine the diagnosis of the disease well beyond say small cell lung cancer are starting to pay off and drugs that might never have been prescribed because they only helped a tiny subset of victims can now be targeted at only those people who have the sort of lung cancer susceptible to the drug. Read about it at Bloomberg.
And how individualized will cancer turn out to be? Very, if things continue to go as they've gone with Vectibix, a colon cancer drug.
So much for economies of scale.
