"It seems that every week a major breakthrough in the understanding of cancer is announced in the media (or on this site - Neil). So where are all the drugs that should flow from these discoveries?" Nial Wheate, Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at University of Sydney, takes us through the process by which new anti-cancer discoveries (sometimes) make it from the research laboratory to actual use in curing cancer:
What you can see are borer tracks left between the bark and timber of a eucalyptus tree. (Recently I've been helping bring in cut eucalyptus wood for winter heating on a farm.) The dead trees that have been cut down have often been infested with borers and termites, which no doubt hastened their demise. A year or so after a tree dies, the thick, protective bark loosens enough to peel off and you can see how the borers have hatched from eggs injected under the bark and grown in size as they radiate from where they hatched, eating through the soft timber. It is amazing how the tracks never cross and how a borer can often travel for some distance in parallel with other borers with just a millimetre or less of clearance.
This particular pattern reminded me of the cancer crab.
The link below is a Youtube TED talk that is a great explanation behind the difficulty of get cures for all diseases and how to design "homunculi" to facilitate faster and more human specific efficacy.
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