Monday, April 9, 2012

What is a cure for breast cancer?

I'm sure doctors have a definition for the word "cure".

Personally, I'd know breast cancer have a cure, if the cure is able to give 95+% metastatic patients a normal life-expectancy, including the liver/brain/lung met folks. By this standard, last 100 years of medicine has made enormous stride in finding "cure"s for a long list of once-deadly diseases:
Bacterial infection (99%), TB(95%), malaria(99%), HIV(treatable, not curable. 90% treatable. but any one remember when HIV is automatic death sentence?), diabetes (95+% nondeadly).

Yes some of them may come back to haunt us later, but fully a generation of patients have benefitted from the cure and enjoying more or less a normal life expectancy.

Compare that with metastatic BC (50-70% dead within 5 years, the survivors have low life expectancy).

If some team figured out a therapeutic vaccine/therapy that will "cure" stage IV BC so that 95+% of stage IV BC patients (including triple negative, liver involvement, brain mets) can have a normal life expectancy, I'd personally pay him $1000 out of my pocket + $1000 from my kids' college fund. I'd give more if I can afford more and everyone should too (remember that cancer cost us a lot more).

I'll write to X-prize and innocentive and ask them whether they will accept funding.


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