Why Start With Cancer?
First, the numbers
Cancer represents an enormous societal burden. Its lethality is rivaled only by heart disease. Globally, there were 18 million cancer cases in 2020 and approximately 10 million deaths. In the US alone, an estimated 2 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2020 and more than 600,000 people died from the many different forms of the disease including breast, lung, prostate, melanoma, and colon cancers. (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics). A cancer diagnosis extends beyond the patient to family, friends, and colleagues, exacting a toll of unresolved stress, anxiety, and grief.
As a nation, the US spends approximately $200 billion on cancer care annually, and although deaths are trending downward (tracking the decline in smoking), the grim reality is that there has not been a substantial lowering of mortality rates. The intractable nature of cancer is heavily rooted in complex biological, environmental, and sociological risk factors that contribute to making it a major public health problem.
Next, the business
Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged and research funding has also surged. The budget of the National Cancer Institute now totals over $6 billion/year. That is a fraction of the total spent on research by nonprofit foundations, private firms and other government agencies (The Cancer Industry: Hype Vs. Reality, Scientific American, 2020).
A 2017 article estimated that it costs $648.0 million to bring a cancer drug to market. For a commercially successful drug, development cost is more than recouped, and some companies boast more than a 10-fold higher revenue than R&D spending—a sum not seen in other sectors of the economy (JAMA Intern Med. 2017 Nov; 177(11): 1569–1575).
Researchers James Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine for their pioneering work on cancer immunotherapy. Hailed as a revolution in the treatment of cancer, immunotherapy works by boosting the body’s natural defenses against cancer. Even though this treatment is not perceived as a cure for cancer, many new immunotherapies can be life prolonging for many patients. There are limitations to this approach including prohibitive costs and harmful side effects. Nevertheless, this line of research has opened up other avenues for study that may reveal new targets for therapeutic intervention. Big pharma is betting big on the future of these medicines.This could be incredibly good news for cancer patients who have been exposed to the traditional poison and burn approach of chemotherapy and radiation which attacks cancer but frequently kills healthy tissue.
How do we make things better?
My father was taken in 1997 by a glioblastoma (incurable brain cancer). I watched helplessly for 18 months while he was subjected to the state of the art treatments of chemo and radiation but to no avail. I remember thinking how barbaric it all seemed. I even wondered if medical students of the future would read about these approaches and think it was akin to blood-letting with leeches.
Since then, new drugs and other interventions like proton beam therapy have demonstrated the ability to shrink aggressive brain tumors. Developments in the use of artificial intelligence to comb through medical images for early detection, gene editing with CRISPR, telehealth, and robotic surgery are just some of the remarkable new technologies making strides in the war on cancer as a whole.
To be sure, much of this technology was brought from the bench to the bedside through industrial-academic-government cooperation. Most researchers would say that more money is the answer and I wholeheartedly believe this to be true. When the drive and ingenuity of industry is coupled to the creative expertise and capabilities of academic researchers, there are few limits to what can be achieved.
The team at Astound is committed to lowering the friction points slowing industry/academic partnerships in order to accelerate the pace of science. Our decision to focus on the industries and research scientists battling cancer is deliberate for several reasons:
Industry and academic scientists are natural partners and have been so for decades in the quest to find better diagnostic methods and treatments for cancer.
There is a vast pool of extremely talented academic researchers not being reached by huge swaths of industry R&D.
Removing barriers to formation of industry/academic relationships also removes barriers to the innovative pursuits that will ultimately save lives.
Most importantly, given the number of people impacted by this disease every year, launching our platform with a focus on cancer will help us serve more people faster.
