Random things I learned today about cancer and personal cancer treatment

Pros about the field:
1) growing at 17%
2) large social impact 3) family social impact (better know what the do about cancer) Cons about the field: 1) Field is saturated, high competition 2) it is a pit, you learn very specific things to cancer research 3) if you do bioinformatics and bio computation, it's even more of a pit with skills that can't transfer out Example of successful personalized and targeted cancer treatment (personalized medicine = sequence the person's DNA, and find a drug for that specific person's DNA and cancer type, as opposed to just using chemotherapy): 1) philadephia chromosome found in lukemia patients. Gleevec, drug that targets that chromose mades death rate go from 95% to 5% 2) but as soon as patient stops taking gleevec, cancer comes back 3) because there are cancer cells and cancer stem cells, each can regenerate the other, so both would have to be wipped out at the same time, but cancers can survive different attacks 4) similar thing was done for skin cancer, but drug only worked for 6 months, then cancer came back even worse than before 5) that was because targeting 1 thing about the cancer almost never works, because the cancer mutates and avoids that. 6) you need to target like 50 things about that cancer, but then that basically becomes chemotherapy 7) chemotherapy targets/kills everything, including the good stuff. Chemo takes person as close to death as possible, without killing them. 8) crispr can only cut in 1 place. 9) genetic engineering is not allowed. crispr can maybe just cut the cancer dna out of sperm, and then allow that to have healthy baby End stage cancer treatment: 1) End stage curing cancer doesn't work. Stage 3b=inoperable, stage 4 = metasized to all other organs, can't cut 2) cancer prevention works, but not treatment? 3) end stage cancer will almost never succeed, can only work in delaying 4) but, everything is just about delaying death. when most people die of old age, they probably have a cancer within them, but they just are not showing clinical symptoms yet Why prevention works and what is end-stage cancer: 1) As cancer develops, it's dna does a sort of micro-evolution, making it more and more resistant to drugs. Early on, cancer cell will detect that it's bad and try to kill itself, later on, cancer dna has developed ability to prevent killing itself. 2) Prevention = detecting cancer early on enough such that drug treatments still work. 3) Biopsy would basically be needed for such early detection, from people who feel no illness symptoms. Or, can also find patients based on familial traits. 4) prevention treatment would also involve drugs.