Direct Assault on Advanced Stage Common Cancers Has Not Yielded Cures

In June, 2014, my book, entitled Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs: Keys to Understanding and Treating the Common Diseases was published by Elsevier. The book builds the argument that our best chance of curing the common diseases will come from studying and curing the rare diseases. Here is a short excerpt from Chapter 8: Though there are thousands of types of human cancer, the bulk of cancer cases in humans are accounted for by just a few, under a dozen, types of cancer. The two most commonly occurring cancers of humans are basal cell carcinoma of skin and squamous cell carcinoma of skin. Together, these two tumors account for about 1.2 million new cancers each year in the U.S., nearly equal to the number of all the other types of cancers combined. These tumors are so common that, frequently, more than one basal cell carcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma will occur in the same individual. Fortunately for us, these two tumors seldom cause deaths; most cases are cured by simple excision. Cancer registries do not bother to collect records on these two cancers, and the published data on cancer incidence, compiled from registries and surveillance databases, typically ignores these two tumors. Nonetheless, we will see later in this chapter that basal cell carcinoma of skin and squamous cell carcinoma of skin tell us much about the biology of cancer in humans. In Section 2.1, we discussed Pareto’s principle, wherein a few common items account for the majority of instances of any co...
Source: Specified Life - Category: Pathologists Tags: advanced stage cancer cancer funding cancer priorities cancer research funding common disease cures for advanced stage cancers orphan disease orphan drugs rare disease Source Type: blogs