This is really deserving of a blog post/essay, but the main thing to get right is the discovery process. We have millions of pre-existing drugs (the NIH has looked at millions on its own), the problem is the way we go about selecting possible treatments from them. In brief what I would do is:
1. Demand we use animal models that reflect actual human disease (natural occurrence in old age). No more sticking human cancers cell lines into SCID mice.
2. Genome sequence all human cancers so that we classify them by genetic defects. We should not care which tissue a cancer arose in, but by which drugs it is selectively sensitive to.
3. Test new treatments in patients that reflect actual patients - ie newly diagnosed patients, not patients that are weeks away from dying and who have failed everything else.
4. Go all out on the immune approach with an emphasis on developing treatments with minimal side-effects that can be given to healthy people as a preventative treatment. We need to think about cancer as something we prevent rather than cure.
1. Demand we use animal models that reflect actual human disease (natural occurrence in old age). No more sticking human cancers cell lines into SCID mice.
2. Genome sequence all human cancers so that we classify them by genetic defects. We should not care which tissue a cancer arose in, but by which drugs it is selectively sensitive to.
3. Test new treatments in patients that reflect actual patients - ie newly diagnosed patients, not patients that are weeks away from dying and who have failed everything else.
4. Go all out on the immune approach with an emphasis on developing treatments with minimal side-effects that can be given to healthy people as a preventative treatment. We need to think about cancer as something we prevent rather than cure.