Chemotherapy and gene therapy for cancer?

Please give your views on these two treatments. What are their advantages and disadvantages? What do you think of each treatment in general? Just give your opinions.

One word to summarize what I think about both: crude.

Chemotherapy kills dividing cells. The mechanism may be crosslinking DNA during replication and causing the cell to commit suicide because it is unable to complete the DNA replication.

Most cancer cells divide more rapidly than most normal cells. Therefore, cancer cells are more effected than normal cells. Chemotherapy does not discriminate between cancer and normal cells. Some normal cells, such as those located in blood marrow, intestines, on the tongue and, hair divide rapidly too. Those are the parts of the body that suffer the worse side effects.

Cancer cells tend to develop resistance to chemotherapy over time. So, eventually chemotherapy offers little to no benefit but, all the side effects.

I say this is crude because of the lack of selectivity. There are only problems with chemotherapy to such as long term damage, possible future cancers, the blood-brain barrier.

As for gene therapy, it is a very exiciting field but, again very crude. Our knowledge of manipulating the genome is limited. Most genetic engineering happens in vitro (outside the body) in cell cultures. The only vectors we have available now to deliver genes to cells are viruses with engineered payloads and plasmids. Neither, delivery vehicle is efficient. Also, there is no gurantee the DNA payload (gene) we send will be integrated in the correct place in the genome. The introduced gene may be recessive and have no effect. Gene therapy has been blamed for causing leukemia in a few experiments in people.

In other words, gene therapy is a long way from being an effective treatment for any ailment. There have been some successes in treating severe immunocompromised disease in children.

Now for an elegant approach to cancer therapy:
Targeted therapy with small molecule inhibitors seems to have had the most success so far. The rationale behind how they work is to have these molecules bind more readily with cancer growth proteins than their downstream target. This effectively stops the signaling pathway and, the cancer is stopped. In theory, this makes cancer a truly chronic disease in remission like diabetes. The side effects are mild because cancer proteins are targeted. Examples of these types of drugs are Gleevec, Sprycel and, Tasigna against CML, Ph+ ALL and GIST.

This approach acts only on specific proteins produced by the specific cancer. So, identification of the gene, protein product and, a non-toxic/lesser toxic inhibitor are all big hurdles but, progress is being made (albeit very slowly). I would expect more targeted therapy drugs to come on the market in the next 20 years which will make certain cancers chronic in remission.

No comment on those, but this might help. Try Vitamin C therapy. A few years ago a cancer specialist came out with a paper that said the best cancer/infection fighter found to date was Interferon. At the time it was $15,000 a gram. The paper also said that Interferon was a by-product of the natural breakdown of Vitamin C in your body. Shortly after that the FDA tried to make Vitamin C by prescription only. Guess why? The FDA has the RDA for Vitamin C set at 64 mg a day, just enough to ward off scurvy. Linus Pauling, who got a Nobel Prize for his work with Vitamin C and a second Nobel Prize for Organic Chemistry, said that 1000 mg a day should be the minimum and 2000 mg a day if you are sick or smoke. He played tennis almost daily until the day he died at 96. Personally, I got sick twice a year for 2 weeks at a time, for more than 20 years, with something to this day the doctors have no idea what it was, but for a week in the middle of those 2 weeks I was flat on my back. I started Vitamin C therapy once I gave up on the doctors. I took enough to be asymptomatic for those 2 weeks. Too much and I got diarrhea and too little and I got sick. Within a narrow range, and it followed a bell curve over those 2 weeks, I was not sick. At the height I was taking 40,000 mg a day and 300,000 over the 2 weeks. After 2 years of that I have not been sick since 鈥?more than 15 years. Vitamin C acts as a natural diuretic so you need to drink a lot of water and watch your body in total, but my kidneys did not dissolve as the doctors predicted, or get massive kidney stones as other predicted. I did not dissolve my bones as some predicted or completely calcify my joints as others predicted. I had no side effects at all. It might be something to consider.