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I recently finished Robert Weinstein's book on "The Biology of Cancer." Whew, what a tome! I'll addresss the book in more detail later but, for now, the take away is this:

  • Cancer is mostly a disease of old age.
  • We all have it or will eventually get it. Perhaps not die from it; but autopsy will show evidence.
  • Most of us end up with slowly growing primary tumors.
  • Cancer is caused by viruses, radiation, chemicals, & mutations.
  • The best possible cure is chemical and--barring any exciting new discoveries--is multifaceted.
  • The FDA doesn't like multi-drug therapies
  • Big Pharm doesn't like it either unless they hold all the patents. If you have a rare cancer, big pharma will either not work on it or charge you a huge amount.
  • If you cured cancer today, you would only add 5 years onto a patient's life (because cancer mostly occurs in older folk.
  • Cancer behaves like a pathogen in that it keeps changing to develop "resistance" to anti-cancer drugs.
  • The characteristics of cancer include uncontrolled growth, embryonic phenotype, invasiveness, colonization.
  • Most cancer is derived from epithelial tissue: lining of digestive track, breast ducts, prostate canals?
  • One of the changes cancer undergoes is called the EMT (epithelial-mesenchymal transition) and that change is also seen in wound healing but there the cells know how to revert to normal.
This is what I remember, I may do a longer list when I go back to review and apply info to my CRF (Cell Recognition Factor) theory.

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