Cancer News Information

The sun rises and the sun sets. It seems like the sun rotates around the Earth.

Cancer cells rise and are killed by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. It seems like cancer is a disease.
The sun does not rotate around the Earth, and cancer is not a disease.

The many forms of cancer cells are the products of the disease neoplasia that can emerge in any of our organs and tissues.

When the normal cycles of life and death of our body cells go awry, unruly cells undergo neoplasia and become benign or malignant tumors... cancer. Although the forms of cancer cells vary widely, the underlying disease... neoplasia... is the same throughout the body. Neoplasia occurs when our bodies' immune systems fail to recognize and destroy aberrant cells.

If the "War against Cancer" organized in the late 1930s had become a "War against Neoplasia" when the latter was clearly identified as the process that produces cancer in the 1970s and 1980s, we may well have had cures for the many forms of cancer today. Words influence actions.

In 1963, Dr. Joseph H. Burchenal of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research pointed out that "It is unlikely that chemotherapeutic agents against cancer will be any more effective, unless there is some sort of an active immunological response that can be evoked." Antibiotics reduce the number of bacteria, but our immune systems are needed to cure the diseases they cause. The same principle applies to chemotherapy and cancer cells.

Following the theory affirmed by Burchenal, some scientists have been successfully studying what is called immunosurveillance and immunoediting as a counterpoint to the dominant "search for and destroy cancer cells" model. They are finding ways to help the immune system do its job through immunotherapy that prevents neoplasia. Michael Sporn, professor of pharmacology and medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, holds that the best strategy is to prevent neoplasia from entering the deadly stage of cancer in the first place.

For this reason in 2011, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) declared in its report Accelerating Progress Against Cancer that "cancer research and patient care could be vastly more targeted, more efficient and more effective. But this vision is possible only if we transform the way cancer research is conducted."

On March 23, 2013, twenty-one oncologists pointed out in a New York Times editorial that "this year, more than 1.6 million Americans will receive a diagnosis of cancer. Their treatment will consume at least 5 percent of the country's health care spending, at a cost that is growing faster than all other areas of medicine. Doctors and patients recognize that this is unsustainable and that we need to change the way we deliver care." They added, "many expensive tests and treatments are introduced without evidence that they improve survival or reduce side effects, and with poor information about which patients should receive them."

After decades of neglect, immunotherapy finally was recognized appropriately at the 2013 American Association for Cancer Research meeting. In her plenary lecture, Dr. Suzanne Topalian of Johns Hopkins University said that despite the current dogma that cancer is a genetic disease, it also can be viewed as an immunologic disorder. She said, "In many ways the adaptive immune system is an ideal anti-cancer therapy." She affirmed in 2013 a concept first advanced in 1957 by Dr. Frank Burnet and reiterated in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fortunately, immunotherapy now can interrupt neoplasia that produces some forms of cancer cells.

Unfortunately, the dominant approach still is to "search for and destroy cancer cells" by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Research on immunotherapy also has been overshadowed by research that focuses only on the genes of cancer cells, which actually are constantly changing.

ASCO's 2011 report went on to say that, "if today's new understandings of cancer biology are to benefit cancer patients on a broad scale, they must be coupled with a modernized system for conducting cancer clinical trials."

As it now stands, clinical trials rely on prospective, randomized, controlled trials. For a lethal disease this approach is neither scientifically justifiable nor practical and guarantees that new information will have a 5- to 10-year lag while studies are constructed, conducted and interpreted.

The general public also is not served well by those who point to increased five-year survival rates as indicating significant progress in the cancer field. Millions of lives have been lost because of decades of misdirected and underfunded basic research.

A paradigm shift in the cancer field is needed based upon two fundamental principles of medical practice: 1) do no harm (chemotherapy destroys normal cells and suppresses the immune system with debilitating side effects) and 2) base research and treatment on diseases not on their symptoms or signs. Cancer cells are signs of an underlying disease: neoplasia. The variety of factors in cells and their microenvironments that induce and that fail to block neoplasia in organ systems and tissues should be the focus of research and treatment.

Words we use determine our perceptions and our actions. Simply fighting cancer by killing cancer cells is not enough and is gravely misleading.

Public awareness and pressure are needed to adequately fund cancer research and treatment focused on the underlying disease neoplasia.