National Cancer Institute wants to end lung cancer by 2015
Published: August 16, 2005
The National Cancer Institute has announced an ambitious plan to end lung cancer’s “suffering and death” by 2015, employing high-tech treatment technology and low-tech common sense to discourage people from smoking.
Lung cancer kills more people in the United States than any other form of the disease but it is colored by a stigma that patients with other forms of cancer generally do not face. It often is perceived less sympathetically by the public, because of a view that patients seal their fate the moment they start smoking.
The cancer institute plans to implement three key strategies: more effective tobacco control; improving the likelihood of cure through early detection; and, introducing novel targeted therapies to more precisely treat the disease. Officials are calling for an additional $40 million on top of the $380 million currently allocated to lung cancer research efforts.
Dr. Mark Clanton, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said the agency’s sweeping plan has been in the works for more than a year, but two recent high-profile cases have provided stronger reason for making the multipronged initiative public. Within days of veteran news anchor Peter Jennings’ death last week, Dana Reeve, widow of actor Christopher Reeve, announced her lung cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Avi Barbasch of the American Cancer Society said the concept is commendable. “We need to make it more difficult for people to smoke, and maybe make it more expensive. We also need better tools to understand why some people get addicted and others do not.” Reeve, however, is a nonsmoker.
Clanton said the centerpiece will be developing early detection and treatment strategies involving nanotechnology.
“NCI is heavily invested in nanotechnology,” Clanton said. “Nanomedicine is about engineering particles or substances or devices on the order 100,000 times smaller than [the diameter of a] human hair.”
In terms of detection such infinitessimal particles can be designed to zero in on cancer cells, leaving healthy cells unscathed. When exposed to specific infrared wavelengths, cancer cells, possibly even precancerous cells, will light up, revealing their presence in a treatable stage.
Experts yesterday also described lung cancer as possibly having enviromental causes. The matter of secondhand smoke is another issue, making lung cancer far more complex than common perceptions. Moreover, the cancer is extraordinarily difficult to diagnose in an early stage.
“People with stage-1 lung cancer have a 60 percent survival rate” five years after diagnosis, Clanton said. An estimated 163,510 people in the United States will die of the cancer this year. “The techniques we have cannot find cancer early enough,” Clanton said. “We want to change lung cancer from a high mortality disease into a treatable, low mortality disease.”
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