Increasingly it has become obvious to me and to many other individuals that our current drug approval and development process has a basic flaw. If you go to research conferences you quickly learn that there is probably no magic bullet to stop any type of cancer, including advanced prostate cancer.
Current drug development focuses on targeted activities and pathways, but cancer is too “smart” for this as it seems to always develop alternative pathways and becomes drug resistant. When we do find a drug or treatment that seems to work, we soon find that its ability to “work” is time limited. This is because the cancer finds an alternative pathway that gets around our treatment.
Chemotherapy, Ketoconazole and of course even the basic hormone therapy are time limited. They work for some period of time and then the PSA rises and the cancer progresses. To many of us it is becoming clear that combination therapies would be more efficacious.
To put a perspective on this we need only to look to the tremendous advances that have been made in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Through the use of drug cocktails we have been able to turn this fatal disease into what is now more like a chronic disease. Isn’t the goal of cancer treatment to do the same, make cancer into a chroni