2 New Cancer Treatments That Give Patients Hope Again | Big Think

2 New Cancer Treatments That Give Patients Hope Again
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We are living in the lucky days of cancer research. Two revolutions in cancer therapy — one successfully tested by President Jimmy Carter — are giving patients of all kinds a new hope. One of the world's leading medical researchers, Dr. David Agus, discusses the many ways our understanding of cancer is changing. From immunotherapy, which remove cancer cells' "don't eat me" signal, to personalized therapy (the kind tested on President Carter), we are conceptualizing cancer in fundamentally new ways.
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DAVID AGUS:

David B. Agus, MD, author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The End of Illness and A Short Guide to a Long Life, is a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and heads USC’s Westside Cancer Center and the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine. He is one of the world’s leading cancer doctors and pioneering biomedical researchers, and is a CBS News contributor. His newest book is THE LUCKY YEARS: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health.

Over the past twenty years, he has received acclaim for his innovations in medicine and contributions to new technologies, which continue to change the perception of health and empower people around the world to maintain healthy lives, longer. Dr. Agus has built a reputation for his unique way of viewing the body’s relationship to health and disease. He explains, “Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. My work in the cancer war has taught me a lot about all things health-related, much of which goes against conventional wisdom.” An international leader in new technologies and approaches for personalized healthcare, he cofounded two revolutionary companies in personalized medicine: Navigenics and Applied Proteomics.
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TRANSCRIPT:
David Agus: Cancer, it's a word that if I say it to somebody you have cancer this is like hitting you on the head with a club. It's a life-changing event no matter how you look at it. My goal is not to be aggressive as possible and kill everything, my job is to make cancer a livable manageable condition so that you live with cancer rather than dying with cancer. And this really is or are the lucky years with regard to cancer. I want to talk about two kinds of fundamental shifts that are happening now. The first is what we call immunotherapy. When cancer cells happen they have a don't eat me signal on the surface. Well, we now have the ability, and there are drugs that are approved that block that don't eat meat signal and allow the immune system to come in and basically eat the cancer.

We've seen this work with a remarkable 90+ year individual named Jimmy Carter, our former president. And we've seen it work with many other patients. So cancers like skin cancer melanoma, like kidney cancer, some types of lung cancer and others have had some pretty dramatic results with this immunotherapy and it's only getting better. We're learning how to harness the power of our own immune system to attack cancer literally more on a daily basis. Number two is what we call precision or personalized medicine. And they mean the same thing. And there's a lot of confusion out there some call it precision medicine or personalize, they're the same thing. And what it means is that I can now, for example if you have cancer, I can take a piece of your cancer and sequence the DNA and look at what genes are turned on and what genes are turned off and hopefully develop a way to turn off the driving genes. And it works. And it works in many of the patients, not all. In many of the patients we don't yet know the drivers. We don't have drugs to turn off every gene, but I can sequence the DNA of the cancer and develop a personalized therapy of that patient. So there may be a drug that was FDA approved for breast cancer, that gene is driving lung cancer and I can use it in that patient.

You know, in the 1800s in Europe they started to classify cancer by body part. You have breast cancer, you have prostate cancer or lung cancer. The next generation of students of doctors are going to classify cancer by what are the on switches and the off switches and it doesn't matter what body part it originated. At the same time,.......

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