cancer update
Yesterday’s news headlines put cancer in pole position as the primary cause of death in the Netherlands. Amongst families of cancer-patients, the frustrating question of ‘why on earth, with all the amazing technological capabilities we have and the dozens of daily new insights gained, do people still need to die of cancer?’ is like an ever-returning mantra. To some in the field it’s a lack of knowledge which prevents us from major progress, according to others the paradigms by which we investigate cancer, describe it, categorize and treat it are flawed and we are in desperate need of a paradigm shift.
A recent cover story in Wired Magazine “The Truth about Cancer“ urges to increase efforts in detecting cancer early instead of trying to fight it later. Early detection could increase survival rates to 90% according to some.
TechnologyReview looks at new developments in treatment – which could be classified as regenerative medicine - which train the body to recognize the killer cells as cancer and trigger the immune system to fight them off once again.
“One of cancer’s cleverest tricks is its ability to hide from the immune system. A new approach to cancer treatment called immunotherapy could spare patients at least some of the grueling battery of chemotherapy treatments by retraining the body’s own defenders–the cells of the immune system–to recognize and destroy tumors. Now researchers at Harvard University have developed a simple way to do this inside the body: a polymer implant attracts and trains immune-system cells to go after cancer.”
The fight against cancer or for knowledge about it, does not only take place in medical labs or our bodies. The known or presumed influence of environmental factors on the occurrence of cancers, also leads to efforts to geotag cancer occurrences and correlating their spatial spread with other layers of knowledge using GIS systems (e.g. NCI, Turkish effort)
Image courtesy of National Cancer Institute
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