Why can’t all illnesses get the cancer treatment? | Mary Dejevsky

I hope the latest breast cancer breakthrough is genuine. But I also wish we paid as much attention to other severe conditions

I prefer to give a wide berth to boasts about dragon-slaying medical breakthroughs. Perhaps it's the awareness that the hopes raised tend to be fleeting, or that the actual arrival of a new treatment, even a cure, lies many years away.

Yet a new study, published this week in Nature, seemed to warrant a closer look. It appears that researchers at the Sanger Institute at Cambridge now have what was described as "a near-perfect picture of the genetic events that cause breast cancer". They have identified most of the genetic mutations that cause healthy breast tissue to misbehave. The prospect of individually tailored, effective, treatment would thus seem to have come a whole lot closer.

Continue reading...