This email newsletter describes our efforts to cure cancer or end cancer as we know it by substantially reducing U.S. cancer deaths from the current 600,000 per year.
Since our last newsletter, we have focused more on planning and less on writing.
We have met with physicians, nurses, funders and others to improve the next version of our Strategic Plan.
National Cancer Institute (NCI) Annual Plan
Some precision prevention activities that seem particularly important include the following:
Our priorities are as follows:
- Treating aggressive tumors with large combinations of therapeutic agents; it is unrealistic to expect long term responses to aggressive lung, colon, pancreatic and breast cancers using just 1 - 2 therapeutic agents. These combinations should include not just agents targeting the tumor but also those targeting the microenvironment (vasculature, stroma, extracellular matrix, inflammation), systemic factors (chronic inflammation, immune system dysfunction, relevant hormones, germline changes affecting the above) and agents that move surviving tumor cells into less hazardous network states.
- Gaining a better understanding of early cancer deaths; i.e., those that occur within 90 days of diagnosis. These may be due to disruption of essential physiologic networks by cancer. If so, patients should be stabilized first to prevent their deaths and then have the cancer directly treated. The analogy is to diabetic ketoacidosis; first the physiologic disruptions are stabilized, then the patient learns how to administer insulin.
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Promoting change in our culture to make healthy behavior the norm for everyone, which includes the anti cancer prevention activities listed in our American Code Against Cancer. These activities help prevent many types of cancer as well as heart disease and stroke and are noncontroversial. We may want to add another recommendation (important but provocative to some) to have patients focus on credible medical sources and reject misinformation.
- Creating the structure for a free, online, cancer information source that outlines important principles involved in reducing cancer deaths. This will be more theoretical than practical because the cancers themselves are already described at PathologyOutlines.com.
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Investigating new connections between infectious agents and cancer, in addition to the known associations with Helicobacter pylori, HPV, EBV and others.
What are the important questions we need to answer / understand to substantially reduce cancer deaths?
Here are some possibilities:
- How can we make the drive to be healthy part of the habits and lifestyles of more Americans?
- What types of prevention activities are most likely to bring about the largest reduction in cancer deaths, even if we don’t know precisely how to do them?
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How do we optimize their effectiveness and distribution? See CDC - Comprehensive Cancer Control Plans as well as California’s cancer control plan as examples.
- What are the mechanisms for the large number of pancreatic cancers and the smaller number of lung cancers with no risk factors?
- How can we better detect premalignancy in the lung and pancreas?
What is your cancer plan?
What ideas do you think are most important in substantially reducing cancer deaths?
Latest versions of our documents (we are working on making these documents more navigable):
