Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 06/12/2026 12:43:47 PM PDT by Miami Rebel
In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.”
What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”
Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing more than 50,000 Americans a year, among them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The cancer has a five-year survival rate in the low teens.
Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the world-class Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died in like three months. It’s not supposed to happen here, right? You’re supposed to have figured this out.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths continued to mount and medical progress on many cancers remained all too limited.
But a change is well underway. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34 percent from its 1991 peak through 2023, and the five-year relative survival for all cancers combined reached 70 percent for people diagnosed between 2015 tto 2021, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. And while daraxonrasib got the standing ovation, it was only the loudest moment in a week — and a decade — of steady, compounding victories over cancer.
One major driver of the shift is immunotherapy. Rather than attacking a tumor directly as conventional chemotherapy does, these treatments use a patient’s own immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells. You can see immunotherapy’s powerful effects through the story of former President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 at age 90 with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. That should have been a sign for newspaper editors to update their planned obituaries immediately; yet after being treated with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, as well as surgery and radiation, Carter watched his tumors vanish and managed to live another decade.
And scientists keep pushing the frontier further. Moderna and Merck reported that the combination of a personalized mRNA vaccine — the technology behind the Covid shots, retrained on each patient’s own tumor — and an immuontherapy drug (pembrolizumab) reduced the risk of recurrence or death for high-risk melanoma by 49 percent after five years. In a small, early Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine appeared to help some pancreatic cancer patients stay cancer-free longer after surgery. Seven of the eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive four to six years later, with a larger trial now underway.
A Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine in 2024 kept pancreatic cancer at bay in patients whose immune systems responded to it. And for blood cancers, a single infusion of reengineered immune cells — called CAR T-cell therapy — has begun producing something that looks close to a cure: Emily Whitehead, the first child with cancer ever treated with CAR T, is now more than a decade cancer-free and attending college. (I wrote in more detail about immunotherapy and CAR T last year.)
And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Last week, a team led by the Francis Crick Institute’s Charles Swanton reported that a blood test measuring 14 proteins, combined with basic risk factors like age, smoking, and lung disease, could help identify people likely to develop lung cancer years before diagnosis. They also found an intriguing clue from an older drug trial: An anti-inflammatory drug seemed to cut lung cancer risk nearly in half among people with the highest inflammation levels.
This is still early evidence — not yet a blood test and prevention treatment doctors can offer patients — but Swanton compared it to how statins work for heart disease. Just as cholesterol tests can predict a person’s risk of heart disease, and then statins can be given to lower cholesterol, the protein test identifies lung cancer risk and the anti-inflammatory drug reduces it.
And no story on modern medical miracles would be complete without an appearance from GLP-1 drugs, which truly do seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic was associated with about 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence.
Both findings are early, so we shouldn’t expect major changes overnight. It took decades between the development of a test for LDL cholesterol levels, the introduction of statins, and the undeniable proof of heart disease prevention. But oncology is clearly moving toward catching cancer before it takes hold, just as we have with heart attacks.
Medical advances come with a literal cost. The new medicines are brutally expensive, with the average monthly price of a new cancer drug more than doubling between 2009 and 2019, while about half of surveyed American cancer patients and survivors have to take on debt to pay for treatment.
Many of those high prices will eventually fall, once patents run out and generic versions emerge. But a greater worry is that the scientific engine driving these advances is being throttled. Almost every advance I’ve mentioned can be traced back to federally funded basic research, which the Trump administration has been attacking relentlessly.
In 2025, the administration froze or canceled thousands of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, while new NIH awards fell by billions of dollars. Congress later rejected the deepest proposed NIH cuts, but the damage was already real: Hundreds of NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted, and early-career scientists became much less likely to win major grants. In saving dollars with those cuts, we risk losing discoveries that would save lives, at the very moment when cancer research is paying off.
The cost of those lives was made visceral at the ASCO meeting. In the opening address, ASCO’s outgoing president Eric Small spoke about his partner, Amy Lin, a University of San Francisco San Francisco oncologist. Lin had died in December of metastatic clear cell ovarian cancer, a deadly disease that still has few treatment options. He brought on the grief expert and author David Kessler to give a talk on compassionate end-of-life care.
Perhaps more than any other medical specialty, grief and loss have always been an inseparable, if rarely discussed, part of oncology. Brian Wolpin started his career watching pancreatic patients die within months and feeling certain it wasn’t supposed to happen at a place like Dana-Farber. The ovation he got was the sound of a room realizing he might be right — that the disease that once seemed untreatable is starting to lose its terrible power.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Have you not benefited from modern medicine?
I have.
Diagnosed with both heart disease and cancer in 2014, I was prescribed a drug which cost $300 per day. I took it for four and a half years. Insurance covered most of the cost.
Now I must begin taking that same drug due to a recurrence. The generic now costs $3 per day. If I get another 12 years on my feet from the drug I will be one happy camper.
My guess is that a slew of other new anti-cancer therapies are in the pipeline. They will tend to put downward price pressure on each other, including the featured new ones.
“And no story on modern medical miracles would be complete without an appearance from GLP-1 drugs, which truly do seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic was associated with about 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence. “
Could it have anything to do with losing weight thus reducing the amount amount of estrogen being produced by excess fat in the body thus decreasing the chance of estrogen fed breast cancer?
“Anktiva was approved by the FDA in 2024 for patients with a hard-to-treat form of bladder cancer. ImmunityBio has been working to win FDA approval to expand the drug’s use to a number of other conditions, including forms of lung and pancreatic cancer.”
It is still important to make the rather obvious point that when a large percentage of the population develops severe, chronic and expensive conditions that are at least 40-50% preventable like cancer the overall risk pool for health insurance companies becomes more difficult to maintain. I am totally supportive of basic medical research for specific diseases and aging reduction treatments overall but there are still highly effective primary prevention measures to mediate the risks we all are forced to bear.
Agreed. Modern medicine is FAR from perfect, but it saved my life from what would have almost certainly been an early death from cancer (I was 57, now 77). Blowhards like to make all-or-nothing statements, but reality is much more nuanced.
I understand; but the fact remains that no matter how one tries to live a healthy life, cancer can develop; and the costs suggested for this treatment are impossible for most to bear.
“They will tend to put downward price pressure on each other, including the featured new ones.”
Drugs aren’t like other things. A new drug for your cancer might not work so your doctor will tend to keep using one that is working OK.
What might be done is insurance companies might pay $X million to New Drug Inc. after Phase I to get an option to annually buy its drug for $Y million/million insureds.
“overall risk pool for health insurance companies becomes more difficult to maintain”
It is my understanding that the NHS tries to buy annual product line needs instead of individual doses of individual drugs.
If a drug company sells $2.1 billion/year to the NHS, an insurer might offer a modest multiple of $30 million/million insureds for the drug company’s product line for a year.
Just because Americans tend to be comparatively unhealthy doesn’t increase the ability of US governments to pay for drugs. US governments probably pay about 80% of patented drug domestic costs.
A patent merely allows a holder to block the making, sale and importation of its patented drug, FDA marketing approval is needed to sell the patented drug.
You’ve been busy lately.
I guess it is good this was not at the beginning of the article or I would not have read it:
“Many of those high prices will eventually fall, once patents run out and generic versions emerge. But a greater worry is that the scientific engine driving these advances is being throttled. Almost every advance I’ve mentioned can be traced back to federally funded basic research, which the Trump administration has been attacking relentlessly.”
Suffer me to repeat: “ALMOST EVERY ADVANCE... CAN BE TRACED BACK TO FEDERALLY FUNDED BASIC RESEARCH.” I speculate that what is not paid by federal money is paid by charity and some by drug companies.
SO, why is it that there are patents on these drugs that keep their prices high requiring patients to mortgage for their lives.
I started out a capitalist but that is falling apart. Amongst other things I’m sick of the oligarchs and insufferable greed masquerading as capitalism.
Part of prevention is also identifying likely genetic mutations and getting those individuals into genetic counseling and high-risk pancreatic screening programs. A large part of the reason pancreatic cancer is notoriously expensive and deadly is the difficulty of early detection but it is not impossible and could still be cost effective in certain target populations.
Anyone with cancer should research Dr. Makis whose curing Stage 4 cancers without the standard poison protocols that Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex is pimping.
Dr William Makis Ivermectin Protocol 2026 – Complete Guide + Patient Outcomes
By Editorial Team - May 07, 2026
Dr. William Makis MD (McGill Medicine, 110+ peer-reviewed publications) runs the world’s largest high-dose Ivermectin cancer clientele in 2025 – he has guided thousands of patients globally with remarkable results in turbo cancers and conventional failures.
This continuously updated 2026 guide compiles Dr. Makis’s latest protocols (from his Substack, X posts through 2026, and direct patient correspondence). We cross-reference his exact dosages, schedules, combinations, safety data, sourcing, and real patient outcomes (anonymized but verifiable on his channels).
https://www.onedaymd.com/2025/11/dr-william-makis-ivermectin-protocol.html
Chemotherapy is an ineffective cancer treatment: The only reason that it is still used is because it’s a gigantic money maker
https://expose-news.com/2026/05/05/chemotherapy-is-an-ineffective-cancer-treatment/
Beginning in 2011, American Naturopath Dr. Peter Glidden has been publicly speaking out against using chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer.
It is ineffective, harmful and is only still being used because of the huge profits the drug makes for the pharmaceutical industry and doctors, he said.
Dr. Peter Glidden is a licensed Naturopathic Physician and an outspoken advocate of Wholistic Health. He is the author of several books, including ‘The MD Emperor Has No Clothes’ and the trilogy ‘Leave Big Pharma Behind’.
In July 2011, he was interviewed by iHealthTube. In the interview, Dr. Glidden cited a 2004 study that “concludes better than 90% of the time, chemotherapy does not work. Yet it’s one of the main treatments in the battle against cancer. Dr. Glidden explains why that’s still the case,” iHealthTube said in the video description.
The study titled ‘The Contribution of Cytotoxic Chemotherapy to 5-year Survival in Adult Malignancies’ was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2004. “It was a 12-year programme, 12-year study,” Dr. Glidden explained. “They looked at adults who had developed cancer as an adult, not childhood cancer but adult cancer.”
“They did a meta-analysis of these people all around the world who developed cancer as adults for 12 years and were treated with chemo … And the results? Ninety-seven per cent of the time, chemotherapy does not work,” he said.
The actual wording of the authors was, “In this evidence-based analysis, we have estimated that the contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults is 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.”
“So why is [chemotherapy] still used?” Dr. Glidden asked and then answered his own question: “There’s one reason and one reason only: money. “
I have “zero faith” in journalists and some TDS Doctors. I too spent seven years post stage three cancer diagnosis which I credit to a hard working Oncologist and an oncological sugeon at the top of their game.
Drug patents don’t last forever. They are commercially useful for only about 7 to 10 years.
And the system encourages research into other possibilities.
I think the NSF has been a great boon for US scientific endeavors.
Sorry, left out ‘ and the NIH has been equally valuable’.
An average adult has more than 30 trillion cells. Some small % are going wrong in one way or another all of the time. In most cases the cell defect results in apoptosis (it just dies) or the immune system recognizes the bad cell and destroys it. The problem with cancer cells is the defect does not result in apoptosis or immune attack. Our current treatment methods are better than bloodletting but still barbaric. We give the patient high doses of toxic chemicals since cancer cells grow quickly and will hopefully absorb the toxins quicker than normal cells and die befire we damage too many normal cells. We also use radiation concentrated on or in (seeds) the cancer hoping the dose is high enough in the cancer to kill most of it and not so high elsewhere that we kill too many normal cells. Think of cancer as an immune system defect (can’t recognize this particular batch of bad cells). Two newer treatments, CAR-T and immune checkpoint inhibitors show a great deal of promise since they actually address the problem. They are still crude since we haven’t refined the technique enough to recognize only specific enough cancer cell surface markers but that will come in time
Bkmk
I think mentality and attitude - and the simple ability to FEEL good and hopeful (not to mention to eat well) - has a lot to do with a person’s ability to get through any serious disease. Current treatments for cancer seem to drag people down mentally as well as insulting their bodies further.
I think survival of cancer today may have more to do with individual nature than it does with our treatments.
Naturopathy is phony science, just like homeopathy or chiropractic.
I’d sooner get health advice from TikTok videos.
As you can see, Dr. Makis does NOT dish out phony science.
https://drmakismedconsult.com/about
Dr. William Makis is a highly distinguished Canadian physician specializing in Nuclear Medicine and Advanced Oncology. With a career spanning over 25 years, he possesses unparalleled expertise in diagnostic imaging, targeted radiotherapeutics, and sophisticated molecular biology.
Educated at McGill University and having completed a rigorous residency at the University of Toronto, Dr. Makis is a prolific researcher. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, consistently contributing critical insights into tumor metabolism and systemic malignancy progression.
Frustrated by the high toxicity and limited efficacy of isolated conventional treatments, Dr. Makis established Clinic Consults to provide an institutional framework where targeted antiparasitic, metabolic, and immunological therapies are seamlessly integrated into patient care.
“True therapeutic efficacy demands that we no longer view malignancies in isolation. By targeting the profound metabolic and parasitic variables within the tumor microenvironment, we can achieve systemic remission with unprecedented precision.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.