Cancer and young generation
According to Wikipedia, human civilization is several years old. "Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago and reached behavioral modernity about 50,000 years ago". During these years, the human race has evolved incredibly in terms of technology. However, technological advancements have led human civilization to reach several abnormalities in the earth's environment as well as the human body itself. Cancer is one of the most significant examples of human ignorance driven by urbanization. We now have an "altered" lifestyle, which has a profound influence on cancer development, progression, and death due to metastasis in most of the cancer cases. Cancer can arise in any organ irrespective of geographical boundaries, gender, socioeconomic status, and color of skin. Cancer never discriminates. Cancer incidence has been increasing in every decade because we live in the same abnormal earth environment. Here are the latest cancer incidence and death trends. The projected cancer incidence rates are frightful as death.
The biggest surprise is our modern system of cancer treatment. For several decades, big pharma has grown tremendously intending to discover and produce innovative drugs to treat cancers. Funding agencies had spent several billion dollars worldwide with the mission of cancer cure. Currently, we have the availability of standard therapies such as surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy. However, we have come to the fact that "cancer can be treated but can not be cured." The reasons are the cancer diagnosis at the advance stages, complexities in tumors because of different genetic alterations, molecular and cellular diversity, hypoxia, cancer cell plasticity, cancer cell stemness, compromised immune clearance mechanisms, and drug resistance. As a result of these intricacies, most of the clinical trials have failed without any survival benefits or modest responses. The worst part is that patients suffering has only enhanced with a deficient quality of life during all kinds of therapies.
The McKinsey Cancer Center in Sept 2016 wrote: "The annual global cost of cancer drugs is expected to be around $160 billion in 2020." EvaluatePharma in 2019 projected a growth rate in oncology sales of 11.4% to a total of $237 billion by 2024. All of this has resulted in and will further cause a financial burden on the patient and their families. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the average monthly costs for cancer patients now exceed $10,000.
Now, what are the short-term and long-term solutions? New initiatives like Global Oncology and International Cancer Screening Network are working towards early screening for several types of cancers. Interestingly, a recent study by Dr. Bert Vogelstein's group at Johns Hopkins University developed CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy approach that can detect multiple cancer types. When are we going to think about long term solutions?
AwareOnc's long term approach is to educate the younger generation about all aspects of cancer at the environment and human body levels. AwareOnc will utilize emotional intelligence and technology to develop indoor and outdoor games, comics, and movie series, and will innovatively connect with the younger generation.
The hypothesis is that "if the younger generation is educated regarding the risk and protective factors, by adopting a healthy lifestyle and health behavior change, it will significantly decrease the most of the cancer incidences in later life." This hypothesis is based on several studies where children have changed health behaviors and benefited significantly.
B. R. Achyut, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, AwareOnc