Posted on 03/03/2010 5:24:40 PM PST by SmokingJoe
Larry Norton sees some of the toughest cases as deputy physician-in-chief for breast cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He has access to the most advanced imaging machines, the best surgeons and numerous new tumor-fighting drugs. But often the fancy technology helps only temporarily. Sometimes a big tumor will shrink dramatically during chemotherapy. Then all of a sudden it comes back in seven or eight locations simultaneously.
Norton thinks adding more mathematics to the crude science of cancer therapy will help. He says that oncologists need to spend much more time devising and analyzing equations that describe how fast tumors grow, how quickly cancer cells develop resistance to therapy and how often they spread to other organs. By taking such a quantitative approach, researchers may be able to create drug combinations that are far more effective than the ones now in use. "I have a suspicion that we are using almost all the cancer drugs in the wrong way," he says. "For all I know, we may be able to cure cancer with existing agents."
His strategy is unusual among cancer researchers, who have tended to focus on identifying cancer-causing genes rather than writing differential equations to describe the rate of tumor spread. Yet adding a dose of numbers has already led to important changes in breast cancer treatment. The math of tumor growth led to the discovery that just changing the frequency of chemo treatments can boost their effect significantly.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
As an oncologist, I hope that he puts me out of business. I’m sick of seeing people die.
It’s a horrible vicious disease
Two of my four sisters have battled breast cancer and (fingers crossed) possibly beaten it. It made for huge interruptions of their lives and in the lives of my baby sister’s family.
My wife’s father lost at only 45, and now a very close is fighting for his life at the tender age of 48.
My heart is broken for everyone close to these victims and especially for the victims themselves.
LORD, please, let there be a solution to this dreadful disease.
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