Rethinking Cancer

Cancer therapeutics currently have the lowest clinical trial success rate of all major diseases. Partly as a result, cancer will soon be the leading cause of mortality in developed countries. As a disease embedded in the fundamentals of our biology, it presents difficult challenges that would benefit from uniting a variety of related and unrelated fields. Combining extant cancer approaches with input from experts in engineering, mathematics, computational biology, Wall Street and Insurance company economic modellers, entrepreneurs, and smart thinkers from, for example, the arts would help rethink a challenging health problem, including cancer prevention and diagnosis, and the development of therapeutics to stop disease progression and prolong patient lives. The topics that were discussed included big data versus small data, engineering solutions (in therapeutics and detection), mixing approaches, mathematics of cancer, population biology of cancer, risk management and improving clinical trial success.

Lymph node metastases in SC+ORT mice

Image credit: Ramon Mangues, Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona

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