Cancer is the price we pay for being alive. Plants, for example, don’t get cancer, which may sound like a frivolity, but it’s not at all.
Dr. Joan Massagué, director of the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and one of the scientists in the world who know more about oncology research, could not have explained it better yesterday.
If cancer is an intrinsic fact in the biological cycle of humans, “a by-product of life”, he assured, it means that it will never disappear.
One in three people who read these lines will suffer from it. Massagué reminded us, and we immediately thought of relatives, friends and colleagues who are sick. Some will be saved. Others, no. “The disease is linked to the rest of each person’s physiology.” So simple and complicated at the same time. This explains why the same therapy works in one person and fails in another, managing to evade or avoid immunity. “Cancer misuses the normal processes of our body. This is precisely the challenge of research”, continued the eminent doctor with a style typical of a school teacher.
Nothing in science comes fast enough for today’s cancer patients, nor for their families. “Although science is the solution to our problems”, he responded with an optimism that is difficult to refute and very contagious.
Stick with this idea: “We are turning cancer into a normal disease.” As usual, Joan Massagué referred to the chronicle. A chronic disease, wow! We now know that cancer will never disappear, but the goal is to harass it by making it medically normal, as happened with infectious diseases in the middle of the 20th century.
– When, doctor, when?
– I am better at predicting the past than the future…
This time Joan Massagué, 70 years old, did not say that in twenty years this horizon of the normalization of cancer will be reached. Yes, he has been heard holding it before. It was not necessary because he invoked hope again and again.
“To eradicate cancer is to eradicate the tragedy, the frustration, the impotence with which we have been living for a decade and a half”. Yes, there is hope even though the time of scientists does not correspond with the time of patients, nor with the rate of allocation of public and private resources to research and to very expensive therapies in which they must be measured very well the results
The oncologist stretched the story so that we could see how much knowledge has advanced. 30 years ago we only had chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Now there are many more therapies, precision, in addition to immunotherapy, the promising liquid biopsy and there is talk of preventing metastasis.
This Catalan resident in New York has been dedicated to latent, invisible metastasis for 35 years (the accent gives it away). In 2012, he changed the course of his research: instead of treating metastasis, he would prevent it.
At this point, Massagué again made a herculean pedagogical effort and he was well understood. When a tumor is diagnosed and operated on, the area is then irradiated to see if there is any residue. If everything goes well, the doctor tells us that there is no focus of metastasis. Oh, great, that’s it, right? Well, no, it’s not. There is no focus, but there may be seeds of metastasis, which the tumor had already had time to spread at the time of diagnosis. Then comes the damn relapse.
Forget that Massagué returns to his land. He will continue in New York focused on containing recurrent relapses. He doesn’t want to appear as a hero of anything, only as a mentor, and he already has his Masia everywhere, also in Barcelona, ??disciples with cancer advantages. He believes that “if the immune system is taught to identify dormant cancer cells, it will prevent them from evading our defenses and causing the metastasis to return with greater force”. The first experimental drugs have already been discovered. It is a matter of time before Joan Massagué sings of victory. Without any modesty.
