veckon wrote:It's good to have hope. Believe me, I want to be cured. But there is no evidence that it cures anything on its own. It just makes your immune system able to identify and kill cancer so long as it doesn't mutate and you still respond. There are a handful of examples of remission thanks to pembrolizumab and related drugs. Remission is not the same as cure. It's easy to forget the breakthrough trial for MSI-H and pembrolizumab was only conducted in 2015. Maybe we can make claims about a cure (in combination with surgery) after survival is studied over the next decade. When doing chemotherapy, do you assume a complete pathological response is the most likely outcome of such a treatment? Of course not, at least not if you are realistic and understand probability. Point in fact, more people have complete pathological responses with chemo/radiation alone (> 0) than with pembrolizumab alone (0).
Perhaps I should use the term remission. Though I do think that we will get to cures at some point. Right now we have better survival rates and the technology to make a lot of progress in determining how mechanisms work and, perhaps how to develop new drugs. There's far more to research, though, than there are researchers or money for those researchers. I toy around with the idea of learning this stuff a lot better than I know right now because I find it interesting and it's a real growth area for employment. But I'd have to essentially get an MS in the area and that's hard to do at my age. My son has textbooks where I could polish up on the basics of biology and genetics but it would be a lot of work for me and I'm already busy with my current job and dealing with cancer.
I don't take for granted that my course of treatment will work. I hope that it works and will find more in two or three weeks but I've read enough stories to know that things can take a turn for the worse. It may be that we need better protocols too - but affordability may be a big part of that problem.