Opposition to veep's clarion cry is growing

N.Y. Times writer joins those who oppose Biden's use of 'cancer moonshot' metaphor

Margot Sanger-Katz

The bandwagon against Vice President Joseph Biden's call for a "cancer moonshot" is picking up speed — and riders.

The latest person to rap Biden's moonshot metaphor — contending that "decades of research have suggested…that the NASA space program is not a good comparison" — is Margot Sanger-Katz, regular columnist for The New York Times' online magazine, The Upshot. 

Biden's rallying cry, in hopes of finding a cure for the disease, followed the cancer death of his son, Beau.

Sanger-Katz's piece cites Barack Obama's reference to Biden's plan in January's State of the Union address, and notes that the president said he was "putting Joe in charge of Mission Control" so that we could "make America the country that cures cancer once and for all."

The proposed budget for the moonshot is just under $1 billion.

But Sanger-Katz points out the clarion call isn't new.

She reminds readers "you can see why the news media has latched onto the phrase. 'Moonshot' has echoes of President John F. Kennedy's stirring 1961 speech in which he called for a space program that could send a man to the moon and return him safely — a goal that was achieved only eight years later."

She also quotes President Richard M. Nixon as saying "the time has come in American when the same kind of concentrated effort that…took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease."

As well as George  W. Bush, who while running for president in 2000, called for a "medical moonshot" to cure the malady.

Sanger-Katz correctly advises, however, that "we now know that cancer is not one disease, but many, with complex causes and triggers, and that there will be no single cure for all of them."

She also suggests that $1 billion won't go far toward sufficiently bolstering any of the initiatives currently being placed "under the moonshot banner: vaccines for some cancers, combination drug therapies for others, immunotherapy treatments for still other types."

The budgeted amount, she writes, is "a small component of the nearly $4 trillion federal budget" and badly compares with the original moonshot's cost ("$160 billion in today's dollars"), the annual $5.2 billion budget of the National Cancer Institute, or the reported $1.4 billion cost of bringing a a single new drug to market.

Costs of cancer research, as well as a glimpse of politics in regard to that research, are covered in "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," the VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at caregivers.

Author raps failed War on Cancer, 'fad projects'

Researcher pooh-pooh's Biden's 'cancer moonshot' proposal, says it 'evokes sense of deja vu'

Vice President Joseph Biden's proposed "cancer moonshot" is unlikely to find a cure for the disease, according to at least one expert.

Vinay Prasad

In an op-ed piece written for The Washington Post, Vinay Prasad, a cancer researcher, author and assistant prof at Oregon Health and Science University, writes that the veep's plan "evokes a sense of deja vu" reminiscent of the 1970s and the ushering in of the War on Cancer — which, he says, "was largely unsuccessful at generating better treatments."

Last year was the original target data of that so-called "war."

It clearly passed without a victory.

Biden's proposal, which urged new funding and increased data-sharing, called for scientists to collaborate so they could overcome "cancer politics" and find a cure.

He 'd apparently suggested the moonshot after meeting with almost 200 oncologists, scientists and benefactors in the cancer community and finding an excess of "competition, territorialism and resistance to information-sharing."

He subsequently altered his goal to doubling the rate of progress, meaning that researchers would accomplish in five years what normally would take 10.

Prasad contends the major flaw in the proposal, introduced in January by Biden following the cancer death of his son, Beau, is that "thinking you will substantively improve cancer treatment by altering how it is regulated is like thinking you can run a faster mile by buying a new stopwatch."

The efficacy of cancer drugs, Prasad says, is beyond the Food and Drug Administration's control — and, regardless, "no matter what we do with the FDA, it can't produce better medicines."

The co-author of the 2015 book, "Finding Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives," also believes "if we are going to make real progress against cancer, we must acknowledge that…marginal gains — achieved a the price of substantial cost and toxicity — are just not good enough."

He ends his article with this:

"A commitment to funding science generally, and not just fad projects or treatment, in time of both budget surplus and shortfall, would be a true moonshot for the United Staes. Sadly, this is the one moonshot no one in politics seem to have the courage to fight for."

"Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers, touches on how politicians have historically dealt with — and not dealt with — that disease.

Global hub may draw 10,000 scientists, staffers

Organizers predict new cancer research campus in London will become the world's best 

Architect's rendering of new London cancer hub

Question: What would you get if you brought together 10,000 scientists, clinical and support staffers?

Answer: A new global hub for cancer research in London.

Its aim? To deliver at least two new drugs every five years.

The center, plans for which were announced this week, is expected to create 13,000 new jobs through a partnership of the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, the council of the London borough of Sutton and the Greater London Authority.

Organizers are hoping the center will be "the world's leading cancer research campus," according to Professor Paul Workman, chief executive of the ICR.

What's new in research and cancer care, in the United States and throughout the world, can be found in a book titled "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," that I, Woody Weingarten, have aimed at male caregivers.  

Art stems from 1 in 8 women getting the disease

Torso project shows how breast cancer survivors turn suffering into display of healing, courage

I've long believed in the concept of turning a negative into a positive.

So I admire the breast cancer survivors who — with help from families and friends —  plaster-cast their bodies into an art project.  

As one artist, the uni-named Matuschka, says in a foreword to the book, "1 in 8: The Torso Project," many of the artworks "show the face of female suffering and fragility" yet "demand a response from the viewer, as if the women are saying…'Deal with our losses, with our vulnerability, and fears, yes, but also with our beauty, strength, and courage.'"

The figures in the title refer to the horrifically real odds that 1 in every 8 women in the United States will get breast cancer.

Symbolically, the first "torsoettes," as the women who participate in the art project are called, numbered eight.

The project promotes exhibits of casts made and decorated by survivors in Western Massachusetts. It was originated by Pam Roberts, the book's editor, a woman who opted not to have reconstruction or use a protheses and has made at least half a dozen torsos to show her scars.

Her purpose? "To help her "excise and exorcise the fear of breast cancer and transform it into an expression of courage and love," she says in her book.

"An Once of Prevention"

The paperback includes a color photo of "An Once of Prevention," a piece by Betsy Corner that used limbs and leaves to represent "the lush green of our hills and valleys, the trees which breathe for us" — and, at the same time, to act as a warning about the "chemical toxins that permeate our soil, food, water, and air.

Also, as a rallying cry to "use our purchasing power to change corporate practices" that put those chemicals "in everything from laundry products to lethal herbicides and pesticides."                                                
The project has gone beyond its small-town origins and has now been the center of multiple free, torso-creating workshops in Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire.

It occurs to me that its motto might be, "Have torso, will travel."

Amy Wasserman and her art.

The torso project is one of a dozen resources listed in the playbill for a new play, "Breastless," by Laurel Turk, that addresses the fact that "there are very few voices expressing outrage at the breast cancer epidemic that continues on."

A friend who's seen it tells me that enthusiastic audiences have been packed with breast cancer survivors.

I, Woody Weingarten, celebrate breast cancer survivors — especially my wife, Nancy Fox — in my book, "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," which is aimed at male caregivers.

Are researchers, discoveries being cloistered?

Biden urges end to 'cancer politics' but more teamwork among docs, scientists, donors

Vice President Joseph Biden

It's a presidential election year so, naturally, there's lots of disturbing politics (no matter where you're positioned on the bell curve).

Perhaps none more upsetting, however, than the politics of the cancer world that, according to Vice President Joseph Biden, is the greatest obstacle to curing the disease.

According to a recent Associated Press story by Josh Lederman, Biden — who lost his 46-year-old son, Beau, to brain cancer last May — is now asking Americans to demand that scientists collaborate to overcome "cancer politics" and, thereby, find a cure.

His rallying cry came a month after he announced he wouldn't run for president.

Biden delivered his plea in Houston at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose Moon Shots program is aimed at finding an end to the massive killer.

The story says the vice president's found, after meeting with almost 200 oncologists, scientists and benefactors in the cancer community, an excess of "competition, territorialism and resistance to information-sharing."

The result, they apparently indicated to him, is that "researchers and their discoveries [have been left] cloistered in their own corners."

Biden plans not only to seek more funding but to encourage increased data-sharing.

It's been half a century since President Nixon declared war on cancer. Clearly, the war has not been won (despite survival rates having been improved, the American Cancer Society has predicted, according to the AP story, "1.7 million new cancer cases this year and nearly 600,000 deaths").

In a follow-up to his initial announcement, Biden softened his personal "moon shot" from facilitating a cure to a more realistic goal of doubling the rate of progress (meaning researchers would accomplish in five years what normally would take 10).

It's been unclear, however, exactly what "cure" Biden seeks — considering that cancer is hardly monolithic.

To learn more about that, and how researchers keep changing their minds and findings, check out "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed especially at male caregivers.

Book for male caregivers available everywhere

Stores re-stocking book aimed at male caregivers of breast cancer patients, 'Rollercoaster'

Help available at any age.

Is finding a copy of "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer" like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack?

No, not really.

Whyte's Booksmith, the independent shop in my adopted hometown of San Anselmo, just re-stocked it.

Other shops around the country are doing likewise.

But you can order a copy from virtually any bookstore in the United States even if it doesn't keep one on its health, medical, self-help or general non-fiction shelves. Just tell your favorite place to get it from Ingram, the biggest distributor of books in America.

Or you can purchase it from Amazon.

"Rollercoaster," not incidentally, is available in hardcover, paperback (the biggest seller) or ebook format.

Does cancer cure take back seat to bottom line?

Extending cancer patients' lives more profitable than preventing disease, says N.Y. Times scribe

Heidi Williams, MacArthur "genius" grantee

Want to know why preventing cancer isn't the chief priority in development of drugs?

Answer: It's not profitable enough.

According to The New York Times, "economic incentives encourage researchers to focus on treatment rather than prevention."

A recent piece written by Austin Frakt and distributed in an online Times' newsletter, "The Upshot," charges that the sitution stems from the "way the patent system interacts with the Food and Drug Administration's drug approval process" — an interaction that "skews what kinds of cancer clinical trials are run."

Austin Frakt

Frakt contends there's "more money to be made investing in drugs that extend cancer patients' lives by a few months than in drugs that would prevent cancer in the first place."

Those findings are based on the work of Heidi Williams, a MIT economics prof and MacArthur "genius" grant winner, and two other experts.

After patenting a drug, pharmaceutical companies "race the clock to show that their product is safe and effective" — so they can obtain FDA approval, Frakt notes. "The more quickly they can complete those studies, the longer they have until the patent runs out, which is the period of time during which profit margins are highest."

Drug companies have found developing meds "to treat late-stage disease is usually much faster than developing drugs to treat early-stage disease or prevention, because late-stage disease is aggressive and progresses rapidly."

That, in turn, "allows companies to see results in clinical trials more quickly, even if those results are only small improvements in survival."

Between 1973 and 2011, Frakt writes, "there were over 17,000 trials of patients with the lowest chance of survival…but only 500 for cancer prevention, which confer the longest survival gains."

Williams' study estimated that current incentives "led to 890,000 lost life-years among American patients found to have cancer" in one year alone.

The best way to address the problem, Frakt suggests, is to have the FDA more routinely give approvals based on "indications of improved health that can be measured more quickly than survival — so-called surrogate endpoints." 

Another remedy might be to extend the period of a drug's market exclusivity to compensate for what's called the "commercialization lag."

Details on research and clinical trials regarding cancer in general and breast cancer in particular can be found my the book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers, "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer."

Will new drugs eventually result from findings?

Genes in African elephants could lead to protection for human cancers, study indicates

African elephant

An African elephant walked into a bar, ordered a glass of water and told the mixologist, "I've got a good chance of never getting cancer."

Sound like the start of a joke about the elephant in the room? 

Well, it's not.

The implication that the pachyderm might have some kind of evolutionary protection against cancer while human beings can only wish for such immunity is somewhat unsettling.

According to a recent story by Deborah Netburn in the Los Angeles Times, scientists say that "just 4.8% of known elephant deaths related to cancer. For humans, cancer-related deaths are between 11% and 25%."

Those figures fly in the face of elephants, which live about 70 years, having 100 times more cells than humans — cells that, in theory at least, should therefore mutate and become malignant more often than human cells.

But African elephants, it appears, "have 20 copies of a gene called TP53" that has the "ability to create a protein that suppresses tumors," the Times article indicates.

That translated into "a damaged cell [destroying] itself so it won't pass on potentially harmful mutations," the piece noted.

Humans have only one copy of TP53.

Dr. Joshua Schiffman

The Times story was based on a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Joshua Schiffman, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City and a senior author of the study, indicated the findings could lead to creation of "a drug that mimics the actions of TP53" — which eventually could mean new protections for humans.

"Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," the VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers, details how recent studies have advanced the body of knowledge in the cancer community — as well as how study results have tended to flip-flop, changing not only from year-to-year but even month-to-month.