To wonder if I just helped to cure a cancer...

[TheWonderfulFanny]

Following a link from the midwife story I came across this article about a Swedish researcher who needs a miniscule £1 million to get a cancer-eating virus through initial testing and into human trials.

So I bunged some money over via paypal and am now feeling less guilty for spunking £70 on ankle boots I don't need earlier today.

A couple of extracts from the article -

"More people have full-blown neuroendocrine tumours (known as NETs or carcinoids) than stomach, pancreas, oesophagus or liver cancer. And the incidence is growing: there has been a five-fold increase in the number of people diagnosed in the last 30 years"

"a cancerous cell is immortal; through its mutations it has somehow managed to turn off the bits of its genetic programme that enforce cell suicide. This means that, if a suitable virus infects a cancer cell, it could continue to replicate inside it uncontrollably, and causes the cell to 'lyse' ? or, in non-technical language, tear apart. The progeny viruses then spread to cancer cells nearby and repeat the process. A virus becomes, in effect, a cancer of cancer. In Prof Essand's laboratory studies his virus surges through the bloodstreams of test animals, rupturing cancerous cells with Viking rapacity"

Care to join me? Seems extraordinary that they should be so close to something that could have saved Steve Jobs' life - and could still save the writer's friend - and there's no funding because it's not commercial enough...

pofaced, I am currently trying to get a job that relies on securing funding for cancer research, the sad fact is that im very unlikely to get it because research in general (i just happen to be applying to work in a cancer lab this time) is seriously under valued and the research is just not being funded :( I have seen really good scientists leave science forever because the funding just isn't there and it is a criminal waste!

I agree with you completely 2girls. It is criminal. I do believe that enough money would cure cancer, if put towards the right people with the right resources.

I agree with 2girls, the funding situation is dire at the moment. Research that would have been funded a few years back isn't getting funded. And the likelihood is that some of that research would have provided substantial advancements.

Peer review isn't a perfect process and can be swayed by all sorts of factors. Published papers are increasingly crucial to getting funding, whereas a decade back preliminary data would have been sufficient. That publication has muddied the waters with Pharma but not insurmountably I should think.

Getting that balance right between funding research building on existing established approaches and blue skies thinking is difficult. And at least this article is raising profile, certainly sounds plausible enough for me to want to read the paper and its not often press articles make me want to bother.