Patient Engagement

Curing cancer in 10 years: Is it hype? And is that hype OK?

When it comes to curing cancer, there's been a lot of criticism over overhyping our current medical technology. But guiding public perception in a direction of optimism could likely have more benefit than casting a critical eye on researchers' promises.

Cancer stirs up a lot of debate: Are the drugs too costly? Are our laptops irradiating and killing us? Is X diagnostic really better than Y diagnostic, and what’s the ROI? Can we cure cancer in a decade?

One question that’s been circulating of late in the Twitterverse: Is the media too skeptical about cancer progress?

Illumina CEO Jay Flatley has told me – more than once – that within the decade cancer will morph from fatal to a chronic disease. Now, many scientists are bandying together and saying that in that decade, we’ll have a cure. Remarks from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center President Dr. Gary Gilliland at a recent talk in Seattle claimed exactly that – and it’s set off a debate over whether this is possible.

A recent article in Health News Review, a healthcare “watchdog” site, cast a critical eye on Gilliland – and whether we’re actually going to get that cure. It says that such claims are helping inflate industry valuations (The Fred Hutchinson center’s aligned with Juno Therapeutics, for instance), and it’s less about getting patients cures than upping hype for business ends.

You gotta wonder if the potential cure is driving the investment or if the investment is driving the hype.

These types of inflated “cancer cure” claims don’t sit well with many in the medical community. It encourages the flow of research dollars into potentially profitable realms at the expense of more deliberate research and leaves the public with false hopes, says Steven Miles, MD, professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics.

“This kind of reckless hype has long been repeated and long been discredited. Cancer is not one disease. It is a vast archipelago of different diseases. In this respect, it is like infectious disease. One might find a cure for a particular infectious disease but the proposal that we are on the cusp curing all infectious diseases for all time is untenable.”

But we all know that criticism tends to outperform boosterism in the media – and besides, casting a skeptical eye on the breakneck pace of cancer drug development is a smart choice so as to prevent false hopes. However, the media guides public perception – and patients really ought to know the complicated truth of cancer care.

I throw myself into that optimistic camp, because this biotech bubble’s churning out early stage therapies with massive potential – so it’s entirely feasible that by 2025 many of these works-in-progress will have shown their mettle on the market. Precision medicine, in its nascence, now needs the infrastructure and funding to really sprint forward – and with the public awareness from efforts like the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative it may get the resources it needs.

The argument that we’re on the cusp of a cure for cancer could work in Flatley’s favor, too – he’s the head of sequencing giant Illumina, and making such claims definitely boosts the value of a service invaluable to high tech diagnostics companies. But… we have the underlying technology. We just need to make the effort – and spend the money. And we can’t do that without a favorable public perception.

 

As Forbes very aptly writes:

Which is why it matters what health journalists say about the possibility of treating and curing cancer, and progress in science. Because optimism or pessimism sway public and private research investments, and also charity donations, and which conditions we attempt to remedy, or neglect, and what individual patients – and physicians, including those not in the field of oncology – consider to be worth treating. And because if patients perceive that cancer’s not worth treating, they are less likely to seek care, even if therapy exists that would help them.

I spoke recently with an oncologist who criticized the debate over cancer drug costs – saying that we’re missing the big picture by focusing on the wrong thing. Drug costs, he said, account for about 40 percent of cancer care – so we need to look at the overall picture of the cost of cancer care. We need to consider patient expectations of their remaining days, as well as a longitudinal look at a patient’s cancer care costs.

“The idea that we can set a top-down policy of what’s appropriate or not is very dangerous,”Dr. Andrew Pecora, an oncologist and chief innovation officer at the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center. “We can’t let the system bankrupt the country – but there’s a way through the middle, I think.”

This same argument holds true for guiding public perception of cancer therapeutics’ potential. We can’t over-promise, but we can’t be so skeptical that we stymie progress.

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