I had planned to post the next section of the Business of Cancer today but over the weekend I received an e-mail that requires a day away from that series.
Scott Atkinson serves on the Walking with Jane board. He and Jane were good friends throughout the time he taught in Westport. They had daily conversations about science–and many other things, including politics and religion. Like Jane and I, Scott reads from a wide range of subject matters. He is fascinated by the world and how it works. Before he became a teacher he worked in biology labs and has now taught bio-technology courses for a number of years. He is currently setting up a biotech program in the school he moved to last fall.
A few months ago he stumbled on a site called TED: Ideas worth spreading. The first piece he sent me was about an open source method for developing therapeutic drugs. The idea was a good one but I was in no position to do anything with it other than nod and say, “Neat idea.”
Friday night I got another email from him about a TED piece, but I had a number of other projects in hand so I put it on my list of things to do later and continued with the boring–and depressing–business of looking at cancer organizations and what they do with their money. (I promise I will try to make the writing up of those dry numbers more interesting than they are on the various websites.)
Sunday, he called me and asked if I had had a chance to look at it yet–and I had to say I had not. He launched into a description of the basic idea of the talk--and my eyes started to get as big as saucers. What he was describing was a fourth method of going after cancer–a method based not on drugs, surgery, or radiation with their attendant nasty side effects and risks–but based on electric fields. And he was telling me it worked–and that it appeared to work without the often debilitating side-effects of the other three.
The method is based on our improved understanding of how cell division works and a study of what happens to cell division when it is exposed to an electrical field. Essentially, the cancer cells stop reproducing and begin to die off. In the talk, they show scans of a man’s brain in which there is a tumor. By six months the tumor has nearly vanished–and at a year it appears to be gone.
A Phase III trial has been done
on brain tumors. The method is as effective as the traditional drug cocktail–but without the side effects. The quality of life gain is significant. Researchers are now looking at the use of this technique in combination with chemo and radiation therapy–including one at Harvard. The method is also being tried on patients with other forms of
cancer with–so far–promising results.
You should go look at this talk–especially those of you with greater biology and medical backgrounds than I have. This could open another front in the war on cancer.
