Lung Cancer Gene Discovery A Sign of Cancer's Future

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Provenge

Provenge: Unreachable and Unavailable

Recently published on: www.psa-rising.com

*FDA’s mission statement: To promote and protect public health.

Prostate cancer is a rather frequent occurrence- with between 10 to 20 percent of men predicted to acquire the disease during their lifespan, resulting in about 30,000 deaths a year from this disease of the one million men. Furthermore, out of all cancer types more are dying from prostate cancer now than other cancer diagnoses.

For those unaware, there are different stages of prostate cancer, and the more severe the prostate cancer cases are which is determined by such methods as bone scans and Gleason’s scores, which is a score that assesses prostate tissue after it is biopsied and if it is determined that the stage of cancer is severe by this and to estimate proper treatment options if proven to be malignant. Typically, the initial suspicion of prostate cancer is determined by the results of what is called a PSA blood test, as PSA is a protein produced by prostate cancer cells. If the PSA blood test is above normal limits, a prostate biopsy is performed to determine and confirm not only the presence of cancer, but also the severity of the disease on such a patient.

Yet fortunately, and as you will read, innovation still exists in medicine. A few years ago, a small Biotechnology company called Dendreon was working on a conceptually new treatment for the worst prostate cancer patients, and this treatment therapy created by Dendreon was named Provenge. Provenge is the first immunotherapy biologic treatment for the progressed prostate cancer patients, and has proven to be a very novel and innovative treatment option for advanced prostate cancer patients who are terminally ill. Usually, these patients are unresponsive to usual treatment methods for prostate cancer, and are left with chemotherapy as their only treatment option at such a traumatic stage of prostate cancer.

BigPharma

I have a friend who was a pharmacist in New Zealand. Everyone in New Zealand has health insurance, because a portion of federal taxes goes to health insurance. A special board negotiates with pharmaceutical companies to set prices they will be allowed to charge for each of their products. That is the kind of system we need in the United States rather than hundreds of insurance companies, the rules of which are all different, and where a pharmacist has to go to law school after pharmacy school to learn how to fight with all of them. In the United States, pharmaceutical companies run on the ethics of big business: "Screw unto others before they can do it to you!" Consumers, that is, patients, are in all cases the losers. Americans are going to foreign countries to purchase their pharmaceuticals to avoid insurance companies and American Big Pharma prices, and they are making out much better than if they supported the in-house American screw system.

Immunotherapy IS indeed the Cancer Treatment Of the Future.

I look forward to the day when the American public is allowed to vaccinate against specific cancers to which they are most vulnerable through immunotherapy, an amazing up-and-coming-and-now-here science.

As it is today, the first immunotherapy treatment to reach the FDA, Provenge, is battling for it's very life from a FDA system that is unable to institutionally flex for all new science that is now coming from all angles, due to the genome's Big Bang, and from the big pharmaceutical companies that make so much money on the now-out-dated cancer treatments we are currently using, those treatments that have far less efficacy than immunotherapy has been proven to have.

Let's demand progress in cancer treatment.

Let's demand more from our medical science than simply allowing the big pharmaceuticals to make their billions from our illness and diseases.

insurance #2

Oh, and David, you've clearly never attempted to supplement your insurance because of an existing condition or predisposition, because the insurers will insure you for everything BUT that - they are called exclusions. I have long term disability insurance that I took out myself and I have an exclusion for miscarriages - because I had one years ago. While I doubt I'll ever try to collect LTD because of a miscarriage, imagine if I had had a heart attack, or have high blood pressure, or diabetes, or......

insurance

Excuse me, to the jerk above chiding people about "should have invested in their health care" - there's another world outside your nice office window. You clearly have no idea what goes on when you don't make 90k/yr.

1. My friend lost a high paying job, consulted for a while on COBRA, and then, when the economy began to tank early this year, was unable to get a job and ran out of COBRA. He picked up individual health coverage, and then was diagnosed with cancer. He could not work and lost the insurance because it was costing him $1000/month to cover himself and his wife, who is disabled and doesn't work. Their kids and friends paid for about 4 months of premiums, but then everyone was tapped and he lost the insurance. With cancer. He was able to get on one of those programs to get drug through the drug companies, but it still didn't pay the MDs. He didn't have a 60k car. He wasn't greedy.

2. Women with children often work lower paying jobs to maintain scheduling flexibility. Those are the jobs that fire you if you have a sick kid twice in a month, or get into a car accident and have to take time off. (a friend who worked for X County, CA) They also provide crap insurance where you have a $1000 deductible before they cover anything. Then you get fired anyway because you can't come to work because you are throwing up every 5 minutes from chemotherapy. This is especially true for single mothers, who do not have the spouse to fall back on - providing of course HE has insurance.

I work in health care. It would shock you if you knew how many cancer patients end up living in their cars. Once you get into the vortex, it is amazing how hard it is to get out.

Active immunotherapy - e.g. Provenge

Thank you for a very nice article. You did overlook one key therapeutic development in the fight against cancer and that is active immunotherapy which harnesses the body's own immune system to fight disease. The most advanced of these is the Provenge treatment which is being developed by Dendreon Corp in Seattle for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. This treatment has shown proof of efficacy in two Phase III trials with no side effects and is currently in it's third Phase III trial that recently showed a 20% improvement in survival rate at interim over the only currently available toxic treatment Taxotere (that some 2/3 of patients refuse to take due to its toxicity). Provenge was recommended for drug approval in March 2007 by a FDA special advisory panel as being 17-0 safe and 13-4 efficacious. Unfortunately, it seems that conflicts of interest by some members on the panel together with corruption within the FDA itself has delayed approval of this remarkable new treatment, where in excess of 44,000 prostate cancer patients have since died without having this treatment option. Even calls for a congressional hearing by four members of congress somehow got muted. It is a sad day when researchers spend their lives developing new treatments and, at the end of the day, politics and financial greed rule the day (full story at CareToLive.com).

really?

While many families do suffer financially as a result of having a family member go through cancer therapy, it is often due to lost wages / career setbacks, not the actual cost of the treatment. That's what good health insurance is for.

Many of the publicized cases of people taking 5-figure loans to treat a loved one have minimal health insurance often provided by a low to mid-sized company to their blue collar workers. I'd argue that these people should have invested in their health care before their retirement savings, and maybe then they wouldn't have to deplete their savings to stay healthy.

On the whole, the American people need to understand what their coverage entails, and they also need to think about how to supplement it based on their own predispositions to various diseases. Sadly, we Americans tend to be financially greedy when we are in our periods of best health, ignoring the need to invest in our future health and instead buying 60K cars at 35 years old.