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WHAT ARE THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT BREAKTHROUGHS IN CANCER THERAPY?

The three most important breakthroughs in cancer therapy are difficult to state because there have been so many advances over time. However, if I were to choose three, they would be for different reasons.

The first that I would choose is the transformation of the prognosis of breast cancer, which has been achieved not only through research, but through the political will of governments and lobby organizations to provide funding for research, almost in a space-program type way. This has demonstrated how you can really fix a problem if you throw enough money at it. We have seen dramatic improvements in breast cancer survival artes, despite rising incidence rates of the disease.

The second example I would choose is bowel cancer. Bowel cancer used to be an extremely poor prognosis and have a very poor outlook. For no other disease have we seen such incorporation of biological therapies into a disease, which has truly transformed bowel cancer’s outcome. In particular, it is an example of a very difficult thing called metastasis, which has been successfully dealt with and cured.

Metastasis means more than one cancerous tumour and describes when a tumour spreads to non adjacent tissue.

The third example I would choose is a rare and very bad outlook disease called GIST: gastrointestinal stromal tumors. These tumors use to have a very bad prognosis. The reason I choose GIST as a major advance is because of the fact that we have completely understood the biology of GISTs and this has transformed their prognosis. Using a single biotherapy drug called Gleevec has shown the way to the future and what research can achieve.  

Gleevec represents a new class of cancer drugs and a new way of thinking about cancer. These molecularly targeted drugs are different because they target abnormal proteins that are fundamental to the cancer itself.

Each year, approximately 3,300 to 6,000 adults in the United States will be diagnosed with a GIST. GISTs belong to a group of cancers called soft tissue sarcoma. Soft tissue sarcomas are a group of cancers that develop in the tissues that support and connect the body, and the sarcoma cells resemble the cells that hold the body together, including fat cells, muscles, nerves, tendons, joints, blood vessels, or lymph vessels. The most common locations in the body are in the stomach. GIST is a type of tumor that occurs in the gastrointestinal or digestive tract, including the esophagus, stomach, gallbladder, liver, small intestine, colon, rectum, and lining of the gut. GISTs are different from other types of gastrointestinal tumors because of the type of tissue in which they start