Medicine: Shooting down cancer Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:04:00 -0000 A theory linking the scourge to stem cells may offer new ways of treating this most terrifying of diseasesEVERY age is afraid of plagues. For the most part, such plagues have been infections. The rich world, though, has brought infectious disease under control and, AIDS aside, the memory dims with every generation. Instead, the fear of disease has transferred itself to cancer. How to prevent it, and how to treat it if prevention has failed, fills the health pages of the newspapers. How this or that celebrity won or lost his or her battle with it seems to fill much of the rest.The military metaphor is not confined to newspapers. It is 37 years since Richard Nixon, then America’s president, declared war on the disease. During that time, the prognosis for cancer patients has got a lot better. Scientists have refined old therapies and found new ones. Moreover, governments have waged a relentless public-health campaign against the biggest cause of cancer—the smoking of tobacco. The war, however, has never looked close to being won. Scan the horizon and there is no sign of a cure. ... Cancer stem cells: The root of all evil? Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:04:00 -0000 Cancer may be caused by stem cells gone bad. If that proves to be correct, it should revolutionise treatmentMUCH of medical research is a hard slog for small reward. But, just occasionally, a finding revolutionises the field and cracks open a whole range of diseases. The discovery in the 19th century that many illnesses are caused by bacteria was one such. The unravelling of Mendelian genetics was another. It now seems likely that medical science is on the brink of a finding of equal significance. The underlying biology of that scourge of modern humanity, cancer, looks as though it is about to yield its main secret. If it does, it is possible that the headline-writer’s cliche, “a cure for cancer”, will come true over the years, just as the antibiotics that followed from the discovery of bacteria swept away previously lethal infectious diseases. The discovery—or, rather, the hypothesis that is now being tested—is that cancers grow from stem cells in the way that healthy organs do. A stem cell is one that, when it divides, produces two unequal daughters. One remains a stem cell while the other multiplies into the sorts of cells required by its organ. This matters for cancer because, at the moment, all the cells of a tumour are seen as more or less equivalent. Therapies designed to kill them do not distinguish between them. Success is defined as eliminating as many of them as possible, so those therapies have been refined to do just that. However, if all that the therapies are doing is killing the descendants of the non-stem-cell daughters, the problem has not been eliminated. Instead of attacking the many, you have to attack the few. That means aiming at the stem cells themselves. ... Pharmaceuticals: Convergence or conflict? Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:35:36 -0000 Drug giants’ recent attempts to buy big biotech firms have provoked a backlashDALLIANCES between conventional pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms are nothing new. Big Pharma, eager to refill its emptying drug pipelines, has in recent years looked hopefully to biotech’s upstarts. The drugs giants have pursued all sorts of tie-ups, from alliances to licensing deals to outright purchases of a few smallish companies. But mindful of the sharp cultural differences between the two sorts of firms, they have generally avoided big acquisitions.Until now, that is. In recent weeks Roche, a Swiss pharmaceuticals giant, has made a surprise $44 billion bid for the 44% of Genentech, the world’s biggest biotech firm by stockmarket value, that it does not already own; and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), an American drugs company, has offered $4.5 billion for the 83% of ImClone, an American biotech firm, that it does not already control. These attempts came on the heels of earlier deals in which AstraZeneca, a British drugs giant, bought MedImmune for $15.6 billion, and Takeda of Japan paid $8.8 billion for Millennium. ...
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