»cancer«

Susan Love demands in an opinion piece for the NY Times (1.4.2007) a revised strategy for cancer research. The peer review system and funding schemes support the old boy network and mainstream science and hypothesis'. There's little room for alternative research approaches: 'alternative' in a sense that researchers, mostly clinicians, deduce hypothesis of a disease from long work with patients and test them in the lab. Today's approach is, actually, the other way round: lab discoveries were brought to patients to make them fit.
"The curious clinician is becoming increasingly rare. Medicine and science have become so complicated that it is almost impossible for one person to be an expert at both. Researchers tend to take a discovery from the lab and apply it to patients; the reverse trip is more and more uncommon. More often than not, someone makes an interesting discovery in the lab and then tries to find a clinical application. There is little chance, much less financing, for the wild idea that might prove revolutionary," writes Love.

Health and medicine is big business, and everybody wants to get a share of it. Now, we don't want to demand industry or scientists, again, to disclose competing interests but the patients' groups. They hardly exist without support by the industry, writes the Lancet (1.7.2006) in an editorial. The paper reports a case where the UK charity CancerBACKUP recommends the drug Herceptin against breast cancer without pointing to side effects or critics of its use. Well, according to the Lancet the charity's sponsor and the drug's maker are the same.

Tiny molecules guide the way for the sperm to find the egg cell inside the womb, or the cancer cell to spread. Barbara Hobom reports in FAZ (20.4.2006) about chemotaxis, the scientific notion that cells have particular receptors on their outside membrane that help to navigate through the body by clinching to special proteins. Recent research has shown that the run of the myriad of sperms for the egg is no random competition, but the tracking down of odour-like molecules released by egg cells. And the ability of sperm to 'smell' the egg is somewhat correlated to its maturity for fertilisation. Concerning the spread of metastases inside the body, chemotaxis describes why cancers only proliferate to particular tissue or organs.

Werner Bartens reports in Süddeutsche Zeitung (20.10.2006) about a Cochrane report that is critical of today's practice of breast cancer screening. It's a statistical work and confirms past concerns on mammography: The screening helps one out out of 2000 women to survive for longer (if all undertake routine screening for ten years). But in the same time the method may yield 200 false-positive results. Hence, woman fear chemotherapy or breast amputation for no reason. Ten out of 2000 women are treated with chemotherapy unnecessarily. Critics also claim that mammography shows up also with cancer types that develop very slowly and pose no threat to the woman during their lifetime. Altogether, it's a dilemma, because doctors have to react whenever they get clues for a tumor by mammography. Bartens concludes that doctors and health authorities should inform women more detailed on the pros and cons of the routine screening.