What Every Cancer Patient Should Know About Cancer and Clinical Research Trials

What is Cancer?

The word cancer originated from the Greek word for crab due to the tumor’s appearance as if a crab had eaten away the flesh.   The modern understanding of cancer is much more scientific:  uncontrolled growth of genetically mutated cells. 

Cancer begins microscopically, in a single injured cell as a single mutation of DNA.  DNA, also known as “blueprint code of life,” assembles the protein machinery of each cell.    Most DNA mutations are random occurrences and cause a cell to simply die away and never turn into cancer.  However, if the mutation occurs in a part of the DNA that codes for a cell’s growth machinery, it will begin to grow uncontrollably.  Hence a single mutated cancer cell clone has the potential to multiply, spread (metastasize) to distant organs.   When cancer grows it also steals the body’s nutrition, resulting in wt loss.  Another common misperception is that the cancer cells themselves do not directly cause patient death, but rather the tumors’ growth crowds out the body’s normal organ functions leading to multiple organ failure.  

Important points about the basic biology of cancer growth are:

1. If metastatic cancer could be stopped from growing, then cancer could be treated as a chronic stable disease.
2. The growth machinery within cells is being exploited by scientists at the genetic blueprint level.

The human body has only 25,000 genes (about twice as many as an earth worm), and of these, 200 genes encode cellular growth machinery.   Thus, the genetic mutations causing cancer can be narrowed to approximately 200 defined genes.  

The known 200 intracellular growth machines are each being targeted by modern drug research.  The future of cancer research is focusing each tumor’s unique combination of growth machinery mutations, so called “genetic blueprint” or “genomic signature.”    If a limited number of the 200 genes may be causing cancer growth, then it could be predicted that a personalized combination of research drugs could inhibit these 200 targets and inhibit cancer growth.

Important points about the future of clinical cancer research are:

1. Tumor gene analysis is being researched at tumor banks.
2. Targeted investigational drugs are entering clinical trials that utilize genomic analysis from tumor banks.
3. Future clinical trials will utilize combinations of targeted investigational drugs linked to genomic tumor banks for personalized medicine