Unfortunately, even if there is a cure based on this interesting findings, it will take
15 years to go through clinical trials and 1 billion dollars. In the
meanwhile, it needs to compete with 100s of promising drugs (which turn
out to be duds) for patients, researchers and dollars. It's possible
it may lose in the early competition for lack of tweaking, lack of
patients, lack of money and languish forever.
That's why I keep
trumpeting the virtues of ispy-2 trial, and other new clinical trial
designs. Cancer evolve drug resistance fast, cancer drugs
development is too slow in the last 30 years.
Cancer drug
development is sadly lagging the AIDS drug development. AIDS bursted
unto the scene in 1980s, killing its patients within 1 year. The
urgency of AIDS epidemic translated to 10% of NIH funding and massive
researching effort and within 10 years, science worked out many of the
previous unknowns and there were multiple drugs that target HIV. Now
AIDS patients could look forward to a normal life expectancy. AIDS was
the greatest challenge and the greatest triumph of modern medicine.
Metastatic breast cancer or lung cancer is not there yet.
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