I am not a fan of screening/prevention methods (mammograms, awareness, elimination of environmental causes that definitely leads to 2% of breast cancers, etc), as they have inherent limitations that will fail a big percentage of early stage patients and do no good at all for late stage patients.
However, research into metastasis and preventing metastasis is still a great direction because even late stage patients would benefit if further metastasis after NED could be prevented.
The cure has to come from a multi-pronged attack, understanding metastasis and preventing metastasis is an integral part. Look at the cure for AIDS, ultimately it comes from a cocktail of drugs that does different things.
If lawmakers really want to speed up the process for the cure, here are my suggestions:
1. mandate or encourage clinical trials for patients of all stages. and mandate better quality clinical trials that track patients long term, do genetic analysis of tumor samples, better target drugs and share raw data (while protect patient privacy).
2. fund basic science and technological innovations, whether in high throughput DNA sequencing, wet lab or tissue regeneration
3. make new targetted drugs cheap/fast to develop/try out. Cooperate internationally.
Still I don't like "prevention of metastasis" as the "primary" focus. It might be journalist speak for "let's get all the other patients on the bus and throw the current stage IV patients under the bus"...
Still I don't like "prevention of metastasis" as the "primary" focus. It might be journalist speak for "let's get all the other patients on the bus and throw the current stage IV patients under the bus"...
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