Moparcanuck - I signed as well.
There are a couple of really cool new cancer drugs that are in development and near approval. One is from Merck and has been given breakthrough status by the FDA. (Drugs can either have standard review by the FDA which takes 1 year, accelerated review for a drug for an unmet medical need - this means review in 6 months, or listed as a breakthrough product, where the FDA actually helps to assure it rapidly gets to the public.)
Normally, if anything foreign enters your body the white blood cells attack it and kill it, keeping you safe. Even if your own cells have a problem your body typically recognizes that and attacks the cells to get rid of it. Cancer cells are not seen as problem cells by the body, so your body does not attack and kill them. Most current cancer treatments are not very precise, they attack lots of things in the body which is why chemotherapy, for example, can be so devastating.
Anyway, what is really interesting about this new set of drugs is that it does not attack or go after the cancer cells. All it does is "unmask" the cancer cells so your body recognizes it as a problem, and then your body's white blood cells attack and destroy the cancer at a cellular level. The Merck drug is currently indicated for Melanoma and has shown fantastic results, but it is being tested for other types of cancer as well. There are a couple of other drug companies working on similar drugs.
The bottom line is that I have high hopes that we are on the eve of a new set of much better cancer drugs. I have high hopes that many folks struggling with cancer can be helped by these. I just hope they are fast enough for people like my mother-in-law...
