What is Cancer?

In the year 2000 Douglas Hanahan, and Robert Weinberg had published a paper called the hallmarks of cancer. This was a revolutionary paper because up until this point, researchers only focused on the minutia, and the separate types of cancers. This paper did something different. It wanted to find what is common among all cancers. They had found 6 hallmarks of cancer, and recently added more. These hallmarks include sustaining proliferative signaling, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, enabling replicative immortality, inducing angiogenesis, and activating invasion and metastasis. The new ones are abnormal metabolic pathways and evasion of the immune system. Also, two enabling characteristics were found. These are factors that enable the 8 hallmarks to happen. They were inflammation, and genome instability. Part of the findings show how cancer cells are immortal. All cells in our body die after a certain amount of replications. This is called the hay flick limit. The cancer cells don’t have a limited amount of replications, and their able to keep living.

What causes Cancer?

Cancer is actually caused by a variety of things. We often like to say we don’t really know what causes cancer, but this is really a copout. Carcinogens are a major cause of cancer. This means cancer causing agents. Carcinogenic can include smoking, environmental pollutants, and newly introduced chemicals. The problem is that science is sometimes covered up to protect industry. An example is asbestos. Thousands of years ago, this was mined and used by the ancient Egyptians, and Romans. The Egyptians used it for mummification, and the Romans used it for table cloths. Eventually it was used to fire proof things in industry, and world war 2. It eventually found it’s way into our homes. Health issues started to pile up, and be reported. We know that breathing it in scars the lungs, making it difficult to breathe. In the 1940s, Leroy Gardener did research proving that it causes lung cancer. He could not publish the results because he was sponsored by asbestos companies, which kept him silent. Many decades, and lives passed until this was revealed. In the 1970s, mesothelioma had skyrocketed 1.5 million percent after asbestos was used as abuilding material in homes. Another possible cause of cancer is immune senescence. Every one has cancer cells, they are part of our body. A healthy immune system will be able to go and take them out before a problem happens. But when the immune system becomes weak over time, it loses it’s ability to do this. Thus, cancer is able to proliferate.

The Business of Cancer

When money is pored into cancer research, most people have no idea with what happens with the money. Cancer drugs are largely ineffective do to the complex nature. When a new drug is created, they often mimic a previous drug, and give it a different name. They are able to mark up the price whether, or not it’s effective. Drugs can be mimicked because it’s very cost intensive to develop a new one, and side effects may keep it from being approved. Mimicking a drug that is already out is far more profitable. If 5 drugs come out showing some benefit, another company could mimic the drugs by changing a few molecules to protect the patent. Another way they can show progress is surrogate outcomes. These by very nature show outcomes that are meaningless, but predict outcomes we care about. An example would be shrinking the tumor size, but this does not predict whether, or not the cancer sill metastasize, or the patient will survive. Size of the tumor is actually one of the least important things because cancer can regrow. Also, prices for drugs always increase. The competition of prices is not as profitable as collusion, or fixing. The effectiveness does not matter when it comes to price. The patients seemingly do not have a choice on whether, or not they buy the drug. Because of this, companies are able to raise the price to what ever they want.  Drugs are the number one reason for bankruptcy in the Untied States.

Possible Solutions

The reality is that there’s not a lot of things that have been studied to prevent cancer. The data that we can point to firmly is that obesity, and type 2 diabetes dramatically increases the risk of cancer. So, if you have either of these, it would be best to resolve them.