The fight against cancer
1913
15 physicians and businessmen in New York City form the American Society for the Control of Cancer, later renamed the American Cancer Society
1947
The first successful chemotherapy treatment for cancer is discovered. Dr. Sidney Farber, a researcher funded by the American Cancer Society, produces remissions in children with leukemia.
1948
The American Cancer Society pushes for wide adoption of the Pap test that has resulted in a 70 percent decrease in uterine and cervix cancer.
1954
The campaign to stop smoking and reduce lung cancer begins. An American Cancer Society study confirms the link between smoking and lung cancer. This launches an era of cancer prevention research at the society.
1971
The National Cancer Act passes, which starts the “War on Cancer.” The American Cancer Society plays a leading role in the passage of this act. It led to federal funding for cancer research rising from $4.3 million in 1953 to an estimated $5.1 billion in 2012.
2000
The first use of molecularly targeted therapy to treat cancer is successful. Dr. Brian Druker reports success in treating chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) with a molecularly targeted drug (Gleevec), launching a new era of molecularly targeted treatments.
2003
American Cancer Society research confirms the link between obesity and many types of cancer.
2012
The American Cancer Society celebrates a 20 percent decline in cancer death rates. This translates to 1.2 million lives saved from cancer between 1991 and 2009.
*Source: American Cancer Society
The Big C is still a danger. But it isn’t quite as big, and it doesn’t have to be quite as scary.
There have been many victories in the war on cancer since the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society was formed a century ago.
It’s no longer a disease that is either talked about in hushed tones or not spoken of at all. It’s also no longer an automatic death sentence.
The battle, however, is far from over.
About 1.7 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2013, and more than 580,000 Americans will die from the disease.
The battle is still being fought in research labs, hospitals and even at the kitchen table as people focus on better food choices and healthier lifestyles.
“It’s no exaggeration that cancer is the most complex disease that we know of,” said American Cancer Society CEO John Seffrin, who started with the organization as a volunteer. “But it certainly isn’t the black box that it was when this organization got started. We now have a blueprint on how to solve it.”
Cancer’s mortality rate has been on the decline since 1991, he said. Today, two out of three people who are diagnosed with the disease will survive for at least five years.
“For much of my life and for most of my early career, we were sort of running into the woods, and now we’re running out,” Seffrin said. “We want to finish the fight and we have evidence to suggest that this could be cancer’s last century.”
Below are excerpts from an interview with Seffrin.
Q: How close are we to finding a cure?
A: We're so close that we actually have some cures. The key point to remember is that cancer is many diseases, all of them incredibly complex. So lung cancer is not the same thing as breast cancer and, oh by the way, there are different kinds of breast cancer. The good news is that for the first time we're at an unprecedented place. That means that we have the ways and tools that we can use to actually prevent some cancers from happening in a person in the first instance. If a person does get cancer, those tools can sometimes not just be effective but be curable. … We have targeted therapy that can be given to a patient with Stage IV chronic myelogenous leukemia. Patients with advanced stage disease literally take one pill a day, and many of them have very few or mild side effects.
Q: So is chemotherapy, which makes some people so sick, going to be a thing of the past?
A: Chemotherapy will still be part of the arsenal for the foreseeable future. Over time, we would anticipate the targeted therapies taking over and being much more effective, but also better tolerated. The key point is you start with essentially very few, if any, people living long-term to two out of three. … Cancer is potentially the most preventable and the most curable of the life-threatening diseases.
Q: What do you think about genetic testing as a way to determine the likelihood of someone developing cancer? Recently, Angelina Jolie publicly talked about her decision to have a double mastectomy after genetic testing found she had the BRCA gene mutation.
A: We now have something that we didn't have before, and over time it will be far more affordable for a far greater number of people who need the test. However, it should be stressed that, at this time these genetic tests are only recommended for people with a certain family history of a disease and puts them at high risk.
Q: What treatments have you optimistic?
A: Targeted therapy harnesses an understanding of cancer to develop new types of drugs that actually target the processes in the cell that make a cancer cell cancerous. By understanding the secrets of the cancer cell, we can develop new targeted treatments that take advantage of those weaknesses and effectively treat the cancer directly, while hopefully sparing other cells that do not have those abnormalities.
The other is personalized medicine. We are moving into an era where traditional microscopic examination of cancer tissues will be relatively outmoded, and genomic analysis of cancers will be routine and become part of the decision-making process to guide us in choosing the best treatments for our patients. With a new understanding, we hope to have a much better chance of predicting which treatments will work.
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