EP 548 The War on Cancer Restarts: Is It Winnable?
The longest war in the modern era, longer than the Cold War(though that is resuming), has been the war on cancer. Cancer is an elusive enemy since it comes in so many forms that to think of it as one disease misrepresents what scientists are facing. And while President Richard Nixon declared this war on December 23rd, 1971 it is disturbing that in 2022 we are using many of the same tools to fight it. We bombard tumors with radiation, slice apart the distorted cells with varying impacts and deluge cancers with highly toxic chemotherapies. To be sure there are new tools that are being used like immunotherapies that harness our own immune system to fight cancer and targeted therapies that zero in on molecules in a cance, but no one advance has proven yet to be a silver bullet in this war. Joining us today is Dr. Charles Fuchs who oversaw the development of the Smilow Cancer Center at Yale University and was previously professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He, along with Dr. Abbe Gluck, a professor of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, edited a new book entitled ‘A New Deal for Cancer’, describing the kind of effort required to reboot the moonshot effort against cancer, as put forward by President Biden, so that the estimable enemy of mankind can be conquered over the next 50 years.
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