Has anyone noticed all the cancer, arthritis, Parkinson's etc... breakthroughs of new treatments every week?

Question

They always seem to equate to nothing. Despite how 'revolutionary' the treatment is described at the time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7560535.stm

I'm not having a pop at research scientists, what they do is great and I'm obviously all for it. It's just the media playing everything up.

Answer 1

These studies can take years to accomplish, and none of them are meant to be all-or-nothing (cure cancer or not); they contribute to the base of knowledge that will get us there eventually.  The media doesn't understand that, and reports each one as if it were something major, some huge breakthrough - they aren't.  It's the media that has no clue about science; not the scientists trying to get everyone excited about a new study every week.

Answer 2

Its six of one and a half dozen of the other-

For: the cell cycle and cell suicide parts of biochemistry are close to being worked out fully. Six routes to cancer are recognised. Gene therapies and RNAi are about to become practical for humans. Biotechnolgy is a well established technology now. Mario Capecchi's techniques of transgenics has vastly improved animal models of cancer/parkinson's/Ms etc allowing a more realistic method of studying disease without human guinea pigs being required. The emphasis is switching to Epigenetics rather than the evolution based classical genetics of Watson & Crick/Darwin

...these are all big big advances in what you might call the science infrastructure needed to be made to set the scene for pharmacological and gene based therapies. The days of lucky finds are exhausted and the time for science based research has come

Against: its very easy to simply discover a molecule eg an interleukin and patent it for an infinite number of possible therapies without ever applying the molecule. The stock market loves hyped up science too as the major breakthrough that turns out to be marginal can generate millions of dollars on share rises

The attenuation of dendritic cells in your link is an example. I guess some of the cell biology has been worked out and the cell biologist probably has a campus company formed with a patent for every possible future drug that can be developed. His hopw will be Glaxo or some big pharmacy company will buy out his campus company in order to gain the rights to future therapies..he'll make millions but more private sector type scientists will eventually be the ones to produce an actual drug in 5 years time. The dendritic cells are part of the innate immune system, i.e. the bit of the immune system that dooesn't involve antibodies. They reside in your skin and they sense threats to the body through Toll-Like_ receptors, Toll being a molecule discovered in the embryo of fruit flies that is involved in forming its shape. Evolution conserves these receptors and mutates them a bit to use them for immune receptors in our bodies ( Humans). But as evolving species some peoples immune systems are extreme..i.e. evolved to react to absolutely everything and they think that something is obviously setting off these receptors in dendritic cells and starts off arthritis. Because this is the start of a really complex pathway that might involved 200 different types of cells/recptors/interleukins etc it is a great find because it knocks out the whole path potentially. So there is some reality to the discovery but it has a lot to do with the principle investigator making money off patents too for discovering the raw material!

Answer 3

its cos theres no real news if you know what i mean in the summer when parliament aint at work then we have silly news mostly....

unless there is some real news

all these wonderful ideas as you say have so far come to very little now if we all have a vitamin c jab we can be cured of cancer.

who knows. not me

Answer 4

The only way to publicise conditions and hopefully get more research money is to hype hype hype ...

These are the same tactics as advertising executives the claims are often totally outrageous but we still buy them

Good for them if you ask me!