Cure Cancer? Let's Rock and Roll!

Welcome to Medscape Hematology. This is Bruce Cheson from Georgetown University Hospital and the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. And it is Rock and Roll Day. I even wore my psychedelic tie. And here we go.

[music]

Ah yes, "Time Has Come Today" and that song by the Chambers Brothers has my favorite rock and roll lyrics of all time: "And my soul's has been psychedelicized."

Well, yes, Time has come today. And in this recent issue of Time magazine it tells us in 6 easy pages how to cure cancer.[1] We've been doing it wrong all these years, and it takes Time magazine to tell us how to do it right.

It starts off with a heading "The hero scientist who defeats cancer will likely never exist. There will never be another Jonas Salk or Marie Curie." What we have to do, according to this periodical, is to band together, join hands.

Is to take the best and brightest from all disciplines, get rid of the silo concept, and bring in scientists from various areas, whether they seem to be cancer-related or not.

And it's a good idea. And there is a lot of money being thrown at this through the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) program, which has raised enormous amounts of money.

You've probably seen the TV shows with Bruce Springsteen and others raising gazillions for cancer.

And the statistics are staggering for cancer, as you know. In the last eight years there have been more than .3 million additional cases of cancer per year. At the cost of cancer 2008 alone were $77.4 billion, and a lost productivity $124 billion.[3]

So, here is what they are talking about, is bring together Nobel laureates and other esteemed scientists -- some of whom are mentioned in this article -- and they really are some of the best we have --

bringing them together -- let them work on concepts together, forget egos, forget primacy on publications, just fight the war on cancer together. And it's basically a sound idea.

At the MD Anderson they have what's called a Moon Shots Program, focuses on a limited number of cancers. (I wish somebody would focus on hematologic malignancies, but that's for another time, I guess.)

Program called the Moon Shots was, according to a recent Cancer Letter,[4] kind of unpopular with the faculty there. But, we'll see what happens. Just putting all of the resources into a limited number of cancers and bringing in the best to do this.

We have to get pharma involved. One of the major problems is pharma's focus on -- and rightfully so -- their pivotal trials, so that innovative studies don't get done.

And the other problem is that companies are often not willing to work together. But there are some examples in this article about how that has happened to the benefit of patients.

And they talk about some concepts which go beyond a single disease, focusing on p53, the PI3-kinase pathway, which is aberrant in a variety of tumors, including hematologic malignancies, of course.

They talk about epigenetic-directed therapies, great concepts, etc.

So hopefully, following this model and having all the resources tossed at us -- such as the Stand Up To Cancer, because the federal government -- particularly in this time of the sequestration -- can't do it -- maybe we can get somewhere.

We continue to need innovation and the guy in the lab doing his thing coming up with a "Eureka!". But hopefully, this new way of doing things, this so-called new way of doing things,

will help us make progress. And it took Time magazine to really let the world know about this potential.

But as I perused the cover, I did notice the date of release of this issue of Time magazine: April 1. Hopefully, this concept is not just another April Fool's gag but something that we can utilize for the benefit of science and patients.

So this is Bruce Cheson, signing off for Medscape Hematology. And I look forward to speaking to you again in the near future.