Cancer moon shots ? The Endeavour

M. D. Anderson Cancer Center announced a $3 billion research program today aimed at six specific forms of cancer.

• Acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome (AML and MDS)
• Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)
• Lung cancer
• Melanoma
• Prostate cancer
• Triple negative breast and ovarian cancer

These special areas of research are being called ?moon shots? by analogy with John F. Kennedy?s challenge to put a man on the moon. This isn?t a new idea. In fact, a few months after the first moon landing, there was a full-page ad in the Washington Post that began ?Mr. Nixon: You can cure cancer.? The thinking was the familiar refrain ?If we can put a man on the moon, we can ?? President Nixon and other politicians were excited about the idea and announced a ?war on cancer.? Scientists, however, were more skeptical. Sol Spiegelman said at the time

An all-out effort at this time would be like trying to land a man on the moon without knowing Newton?s laws of gravity.

The new moon shots are not a national attempt to ?cure cancer? in the abstract. They are six initiatives at one institution to focus research on specific kinds of cancer. And while we do not yet know the analog of Newton?s laws for cancer, we do know far more about the basic biology of cancer than we did in the 1970?s.

There are results that suggest that there is some unity beyond the diversity of cancer, that ultimately there are a few common biological pathways involved in all cancers. Maybe some day we will be able to treat cancer in general, but for now it looks like the road forward is specialization. Perhaps specialized research programs will uncover some of these common patters in all cancer.

Related links:

cancermoonshots.org
Ph.D. Comics on cancer
Bayesian clinical trials in one zip code

Source: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/09/21/cancer-moon-shots/

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