NPR article on cancer treatment cost

NPR recently published an article on cancer treatment and medical debts.

Cancer is one of the leading cause of deaths in the US. However, thanks to medical research and breakthroughs, many more patients are surviving compared to decades ago.

Unfortunately, the cost of treatment often put patients and their families in medical debt. 

In the article, Dr. Veena Shankaran, a University of Washington oncologist who began studying the financial impact of cancer after seeing patients ruined by medical bills said: "Even if someone survives the cancer, they often can't shake the debt."

Shankaran found that cancer patients were 71% more likely than Americans without the disease to have bills in collections, face tax liens and mortgage foreclosure, or experience other financial setbacks. Analyzing bankruptcy records and cancer registries in Washington state, Shankaran and other researchers also discovered that cancer patients were 2½ times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without the disease.

And cancer patients who went bankrupt were more likely to die than those who did not. Oncologists have a name for this: "financial toxicity," a term that echoes the intractable vomiting, life-threatening infections and other noxious effects of chemotherapy. 

This is a sobering article regarding medical debts. Unless there is an overhaul of the current healthcare model, I'm not sure how to solve this social issue. For now, I've listed some resources for financial help from non-profit organizations. Hopefully one day in the future, we have enough voter willpower to change the system.

Exciting news about an experimental drug that could change the field of cancer research

As reported in NPR's article: This experimental drug could change the field of cancer research, a very small group of patients with rectal cancer took a drug called dostarlimab for six months under a trial done by New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

"The trial resulted in every single one of their tumors disappearing. The trial group included just 18 people, and there's still more to be learned about how the treatment worked. But some scientists say these kinds of results have never been seen in the history of cancer research."

Dr. Hanna Sanoff of the University of North Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center joined NPR's All Things Considered to discuss how this drug works and what it could mean for the future of cancer research. She concluded that: "What I'd really like us to do is get a bigger trial where this drug is used in a much more diverse setting to understand what the real, true response rate is going to be. It's not going to end up being 100 percent."

According to Washington Post's Eye-catching cancer drug trial results have researchers asking: What’s next?, "Though the trial was tested in patients whose tumor mutation is present in roughly 4 percent of all cancer cases, the results provide a template for how to tailor immunotherapy drugs to attack specific tumors that, due to their mutation, tend to be more resistant to traditional therapies, according to Julie Gralow, chief medical officer and executive vice president of American Society of Clinical Oncology."

The article about the study is published at NEJM: Improving Treatment Approaches for Rectal Cancer.

 

 

mRNA Vaccines and Cancer Treatments

There are some promising development in mRNA technology and cancer treatment. 

In a recent article, the National Cancer Institute wrote that "some investigators believe the success of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could help accelerate clinical research on mRNA vaccines to treat cancer."

According to the article "Dozens of clinical trials are testing mRNA treatment vaccines in people with various types of cancer, including pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma. Some vaccines are being evaluated in combination with drugs that enhance the body’s immune response to tumors."

There is hope that the personalized mRNA cancer vaccines can be developed. 

The full article can be round here: mRNA Vaccines to Treat Cancer. 

Mayo Clinic's research finds that mRNA improves the response to cancer immunotherpay in patients who weren't responding to treatment.  The study is published in Cancer Immunology Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. 

The full article can be found here: Mayo Clinic research finds immune system responds to mRNA treatment for cancer.