Cancer Treatments and Diagnostics Get Better

I keep receiving articles every week on lots of subjects.  What I find fascinating is that just about every week I receive at least one other bit of news on how to detect or treat cancer.  Not only that, but what is shared is amazing!

Most people are quite discouraged and confused about cancer.  The disease is unlike most other diseases that we encounter and it is in the top two diseases in North America for fatalities.  Part of the problem is that that it isn't a single disease, just like heart disease isn't a single disease either.

I would better qualify cancer as a condition where cells in a person's body have mutated in such a way that they divide uncontrollably.  Depending on the type of mutation, the type of cell it happens and where the mutation occurs specifically, the person afflicted can be affected by a wide variety of cancer types from hard tumors to independent cancerous cells floating about like what happens when one gets leukemia (blood cancer).  Here is one of several possible definitions for Cancer.

Because there are as many kinds of cancers as there are people, the more great treatment tools we have at our disposal, the better.

I talk about this and new interesting treatments in the video below.  I also did a short summary of each new piece of information right afterwards too.

Let's get started with some new diagnostics tools people can use by themselves (or could do so soon):

1. Diagnose pancreatic cancer using a smartphone app:  2 friends of mine died of pancreatic cancer in the past 10 years or so.  They were both surprised of the discovery and they both died less than 6 months after diagnosis.  This type of cancer is usually very aggressive and the 5 year survival rate is just 9%.  Now we have an app that scans the color of the whites of our eyeballs for signs of this form of cancer. This allows individuals to check for this type of cancer and detect it way, way before it gets too late, thus allowing them to seek treatment much sooner.
2. Pen-like tool allowing surgeons to detect cancerous tissue during operations:  for some cancers, the best way to get rid of it is to remove the cancer itself.  This is somewhat easy if all the cancer is located in a single or multiple easy to identify tumors.   However, if the surgeon doesn't get all the cancerous cells out, it will just regrow again.  This pen-like tool would allow surgeons to detect remaining cancerous tissue before and during the operation to make sure they get it all out.  It will even detect tumors if it in marginal areas between normal and cancerous tissues with a 96% success rate.  Though the article doesn't say, I presume this could be used at home or in clinics to detect skin tumors since they can be accessed without a scalpel.

Now for more treatment methods doctors will be able to add into their toolbox to defeat cancer:

1. Zika virus solicited to help cure deadly glioblastomas:  Glioblastomas are nasty.  It is a type of brain cancer that forms a tumor that looks like a spiderweb, embedding itself in the brain in such a way that doctors cannot operate to remove it.  You're left with chemotherapy and other non-operation therapies to have any hope for a cure.  What the researchers did is they modified the virus so that it would kill only the cancerous cells (this specific type) while leaving normal cells alone.  It is leveraging a virus that is known to affect the specific cells that turn into glioblastomas.  This is very exciting and not the only virus that has been tested to do this sort of thing to specifically target cancer cells.  In fact many labs are testing different viruses to target and kill specific cancer types all over (all kinds of cancers affecting all kinds of cells).
2. Using gold nano-particles to destroy cancer cells:  This is not absolutely new but researchers are getting better and better results.  What this entails is to inject the area where the tumor is located with gold nano-particles that migrate preferably to the tumorous tissue because of the open vasculature present in tumors.  Then, lasers are used to focus on the tumorous growth, heating up the nano-particles enough that they destroy the cells.  Normal tissue is generally left alone and left unharmed by the nano-particles as well.  To get good results though, the researchers have to combine this treatment with standard immunotherapy. 
3. CAR-T cancer treatment approved by FDA:  This is a new treatment that has just been approved for use in hospitals, and it is the first such treatment that uses the patient's own immune cells to generate a custom cure.  In essence, the treatment consists of taking the patient's T-Cells and programming them to attack the blood cancer cells that is causing the patient's cancer.  There is a caveat though:  the FDA has only approved the treatment for when the patient has no other resort.  It is new and currently costs nearly $500,000 USD because it is so specific.  However, if it is your last resort, why not?  Especially when the treatment has shown, for now, a success rate of 83% in putting serious cancers like Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) into remission.  It is speculated that this technique may, with time, be useful to treat other types of cancers and even tumors but more tests 

All in all, the news are pretty good.  With more ways to diagnose cancers early (and potentially by ourselves), more people will survive their cancers.  With more ways to tackle this beast, more people will survive their cancers.

So... good news... and more to come.  We'll get there...