New Discoveries, New Reasons to Hope

Cancer is scary -- there’s no doubt about it. We all live in fear of it, and 1.4 million are diagnosed each year. Then there’s treatment, therapy, pain, waiting, and either death, recovery or relapse. As a result, patients and families often have a difficult time sustaining hope in the face of a cancer diagnosis. But as you’ll see in this week’s Health Politics program, a new direction of research is giving us just that -- a reason to hope. A scientific, tangible reason to hope. With more research focused in this direction, we could be on our way to more effective treatments and a cure. The vehicle? Stem cells. There is now abundant evidence that in a variety of cancers, including leukemia, breast cancer and brain cancer, stem cells -- an “evil” kind -- are responsible for the cancers’ growth, spread and recurrences.

But we have a lot of hurdles to overcome and many questions that need answers. How do these “cancer stem cells” function and behave? Why aren’t they destroyed with chemotherapy? If we create treatments that kill these stem cells, will the cancer be gone for good? How can we kill them without destroying the good stem cells that are required for organ function? I’ve proposed additional questions in the show. As you’ll see, there are still a lot of unknowns – but at least we’re making progress, and where there’s progress, there’s always reason to hope.