Jeffrey Bash - OT: cancer - The unusual thing about the antiangiogenesis strategy is that it is not a "cure" but rather a way to box the disease. It's built on the physics of the situation relating to the distance that an oxygen molecule can travel via diffusion in a biological matrix. It turns out that a cancer can only grow to be ~1mm in size without a dedicated blood vessel. (A basic element of the healing process is to grow new blood vessels to bring oxygen where needed - be it an infection, a wound or surgical incision, etc.) Unless the cancer is located in a strategic place, a 1mm space occupying lesion will cause little or no problem. (Curiously there is still some argument in the literature about how a cancer causes death/ it probably works via starvation, but that's another story.) To get big, cancers need to develop their own blood vessel conduit. With something that abrogates angiogenesis, blood vessels don't form. However, since this process is of central importance to the organism, you also won't heal wounds, cure infections, grow muscle, etc, etc. The sexy part of this story has been the lure of curing cancer. The productive part of the story has been the understanding of wound biology. For the first time surgeons can understand why their trade works. And vascular surgeons could be threatened by pills. How you invest in it, go to medical school I guess.
JMHO
Lau |
