Debunking myths: Is there a pharmaceutical conspiracy to find the cancer cure?

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(Edited)


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A brief introduction

  Before starting to the discussion about this topic I will present a little bit better who am I and I never got any money from any pharmaceutical company. I worked between 2007 and 2017 in two different government public companies in Brazil (which included my master and doctorate in genomics and transcriptomics using bioinformatics in different topics related to cancer). These companies are the National Cancer Institute (INCA) and the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (FIOCRUZ) . Both are public funded and all my salaries there were funded by public grants without any private incentive. I would say that the only private incentive that I got was a international conference paid by Qiagen (a company that produces lab equipment and kits). My post-doc was also in a non-profit institute (the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute in Canada) which had public/private investments (which at least what I knew no pharmaceutical companies funded) , but I never worked in any investigation with any drugs, our research was based on new diagnosis and prognosis methods using plasma from the patients. I worked there until January this year, which means 15 years of reading and doing research on cancer. Now I am working with another topic in a government public institution, antimicrobial resistance genomics.

  All that I am going to mention here is based on other works and even I will try to cite as more good reliable HIVE articles that I have found and they are well written.

Cancer treatment vs other diseases treatment

  There are different aspects that people think about cancer treatment and question it around. The first question that usually think about the topic is why we can cure all diseases but only cancer no?

  This question has lots of flaws, so let's start point by point:

1. Not all diseases have a cure including those caused by infections diseases

  The problem is that in the biggest amount of time, one individual will have problems with regular flu and common bacterial infections problems in their whole life. The flu caused by influenza doesn't have,a cure, but still the person will get better in a couple of days. And for bacteria infections, there is usually a Tx that will cure in a big percentage of times, excluding these ultra-resistant bacteria infections which aren't common. However, there isn't a cure for many diseases caused specifically by viruses and protozoa. Take this brain eater amoeba as an extreme example here is the video from Kurzgesagt project about it:

2. Cancer isn't a disease! In reality is a group of diseases

  The good post from @momins already mentioned about this in here . Every tumor is different from the other. Different from specific genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, which is caused by one specific mutation. Different types of cancer with different mutation and expression profiles can be found. Even if two people with an initial lung tumor, probably they won't have the same genetic profile if we go look deeply. That's why we see people responding well to a specific treatment and others don't. That's why in the field nowadays we talk a lot about personalized medicine. The goal of personalized medicine is to identify the main mutations and expression profiles in each individual tumor to identify which treatments will fail and which can have better success.

3. Some tumors can be cured!

  Despite of this term of "cure" is not acceptable since you always have the possibility of recurrence. There are some tumors which the patient has a high percentage of not seeing the disease anymore, with more than 90% of chance that for at least in 5 years you won't hear about it by the doctor, and probably you will die with something else, such as a heart attack. Mostly this happens to tumors that grow in a slow way, so it is easier that a treatment or surgery in the initial stages will help with it. Some examples are Breast Cancer in stage 0 or 1, Melanoma, Thyroid Cancer and prostate cancer. You can find some explanation about this in here.

So, are pharmaceutical companies little angels?

 The short answer is that of course not. They are companies like any other companies that are finding new ways to get more profit. So a universal cancer cure (which I don't believe in that) would give them tons of profits, imagine also the profit of all insurance plans?

  In addition, because of that we know that pharmaceutical companies don't invest much and diseases that they won't have as many profit as others. It is the same that it is totally understandable if a REIT companies won't build luxury houses in a poor neighbor. It is sad but they are focused in profit. That's what happen a lot with lot's neglected tropical diseases, such as Malaria, Leishmaniosis and other diseases that happens in poor countries and mostly don't have much money to spend in high-end treatments. And that also happens with cancer! There are some tumors with more incidences in poor countries which don't have much incidence in North America and Europe. So you won't see much treatment diversity for these type of tumors. But for lung cancer which is in the top 5 of rich countries, you will see the most of the research in this area. Immunotherapy is very expensive usually individuals need the help of governments to receive it. There is a good article about immunotherapy if you guys are curious about made by @cyprianj in here.

Conclusion

  There are thousands of scientists working with cancer research around the world, most of them are not funded by pharmaceutical companies, but even those they are, they are trying to find the best innovations in the treatment and diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. So I hope that the points mentioned are clear . See you next time!


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11 comments
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Greetings dear friend @gwajnberg, excellent your article, focusing a little on a social level it is clear that cancer does not escape the social strata, and like good capitalist companies the pharmaceutical focuses only on those problems with cancer that have greater presence in the richest countries.

It is clear that they are companies and are looking for economic income and it is also among said the work of the governments of the world that through organizations such as the UN do not strongly promote research aimed at treating cancer in all latitudes of the world. It is like sustainable development, they talk a lot about it but they do not generate convincing answers in favor of a humanistic change of society.

See you later brother, have a great week.

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Actually I don't know if the UN has that much power. I think all the world needs to be united to help each other! During the COVID pandemic, we saw that world leaders were only concerned with their own population and didn't help any other country! The world needs more unity thinking.

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Yeah, there's no single simple answer for this complex disease group and the way pharmaceuticals approach it. I would like to say the answer is somewhere in the middle, but it's more like clear as mud.

!discovery 23

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This is what brought me to this area! The more we understand it more questions appear!

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(Edited)

Interesting article. May I ask what you think of Wim Hoff's research? Specifically with the Ebola experiments? I'll look for a link now.
Edit : here's the link to a study Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans

And here's Wim Hoff's website

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Hi there thanks for the reading! I am not a virus researcher specialist. But I read the article that you showed which is interesting showing how neural activity can manipulates a immune response. I already read somewhere that auto-immune diseases can be trigger by the emotional of the patient. The patient has already a genetic predisposition, but the trigger can happen after a certain neurological response, a stressful event that happens. So breathing training as we have in Yoga can be used to help avoid these problems. For ebola, I guess the article doesn't mention anything. Ebola is caused by a deadly virus that mostly destroys the organism quickly. It is very aggressive, and I think the first thing it attacks is the immune cells (like HIV, but faster and with more aggression). So, I can be wrong, but with ebola, this technique to help deal with immune stress won't help much.

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