“For as long as cancer treatment has existed, ‘cutting it out has been the best way to cure it.’” Those are the words of Washington Post reporter Kim Bellware. Bellware is quoting Luis Diaz, a gastrointestinal medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Please read Bellware and Diaz’s words again, and contemplate the profound, life-enhancing meaning of them.
The simple, exciting truth is that pharmaceutical advances have us positioned to evade some of the most brutal aspects of a cancer diagnosis. Figure that news of contracting cancer is horrible and jarring as is, only for what follows to frequently make the diagnosis the best part of what’s an awful ordeal. It seems we’re on the verge of a much better medical present and future.
It’s all thanks to dostarlimab, a drug initially discovered by AnaptysBio, and that is being manufactured and brought to market by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. According to Bellware, eighty percent of the cancer patients treated with dostarlimab “did not require chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, including organ removal.”
To say that it’s a remarkable medical leap is a bit of an understatement, but hopefully this is just the beginning of many amazing leaps followed by many understatements. If so, doctors and patients will eventually look back on medicine as practiced in the first third of the 21st century with a fair amount of surprise, and a lot of horror.
To understand why, it’s useful to travel back in time to the mid-19th century. A broken hip was a death sentence. As for a broken femur, those who suffered one had a thirty percent chance of living. Where it becomes gruesome is in contemplating the other 70 percent “lucky” enough to survive: they frequently had to endure amputation as a cure. It’s sickening to think about.
Back to the present, it’s no reach to say that chemotherapy and radiation, though effective and certainly essential in the battle to eradicate certain forms of cancer, have barbaric qualities. As for surgery, Diaz put it this way to Bellware: “Imagine being in your 20s and having to lose an organ in your body that will change how you interact with the world, change your fertility, change sexual function or change just your quality of life in general.” Precisely.
Which is why the development of dostarlimab righly elicits so much optimism. As readers no doubt know, the most basic of surgeries can frequently be agony to recover from. At which point, imagine recovery (not just physically, but also psychologically) from surgery that removes a very real part of the brilliant “machine” that we know as the human body. Optimism doesn’t do dostarlimab justice. The drug is life changing.
Pharmaceutical advances have future patients on the doorstep of cures that will free them not just from organ removal, but crucially from the horrors of having their insides attacked so that the bad and good of what’s inside the body can be destroyed. Let’s call it what it is, attacking the body and profoundly altering it to save it.
It’s a reminder of what can’t be said enough: the resources necessary to solve the most awful of health maladies already exist. What doesn’t exist is the knowledge necessary to turn yesterday’s diseases and health challenges into today’s afterthoughts. Knowledge is expensive, it requires the matching of capital with talent, but the fruits of relentless knowledge attainment are brilliant, and vivified by dostarlimab.
The above truth will be revealed as most evident in the future, and when a drug that’s finally reaching a limited number of patients becomes common. People will then look back at chemotherapy, radiation and organ removal with revulsion, along with gratitude that they don’t have to suffer any of the three. Let’s just make sure the pharmaceutical advances don’t stop there.
