A cure for cancer from immunotherapy?
Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used."
However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.
On the other hand, it may prove to be not that expensive at all. It seems to me something quite amenable to economies of scale, and reduction of cost through technology advances.
This is what kills me about modern medical research. We already know what the outcomes are for melanoma. World wide it's estimated that 48,000 people will die of skin cancer this year. No one has ever convincingly explained to me why we can't try to change the odds for everyone. If only 40,000 die in 2008 we've (a) shown that the treatment reduces the odds of death, and (b) saved 8,000 lives. The only thing testing a cure on less than the whole population does is let people die.
"The only thing testing a cure on less than the whole population does is let people die."
The whole healthy population? That's not a good idea, there are plenty of things that can and do go wrong in many ways and with many different degrees of impact.