[extropy-chat] Cool: Cancer Killing Nano

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sun, 22 Feb 2004, Harvey Newstrom wrote (regarding a new cancer therapy):

> > This isn't new, its a form of nanohype.
>
> I was afraid of this.  The article seemed deliberately vague on details and
> big on hype.  Sigh....

Oh, it isn't that bad -- there are some antibody therapies that appear to
be showing some promise -- probably those where the tumor up-regulates
a specific hormone receptor.  The angiogenesis inhibitors are also doing
fairly well -- the problem is there may be a number of angiogenesis promoter
"hormones" that one has to deal with.

The success with Gleevec against certain types of leukemia suggests that
the problems can be solved but its going to take specific knowledge of
what is going wrong and a very focused approach to dealing with it.

Simply understanding that there may be a few thousand genes involved in
cell replication and Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong it will")
would tend to lead one to the conclusion that cancer is going to be a very
tough problem to solve.  I'm sure we solved more problems in going
to the moon.  Its just that we really didn't have the tools (the genome
sequence) to effectively deal with cancer until circa 2000.

Robert