Cancer is the price we pay to be alive. Plants, for example, do not have cancer, which may sound frivolous but it is not at all.
Dr. Joan Massagué, director of the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and one of the scientists in the world who knows the most about oncological research, could not have explained it better yesterday.
If cancer is something intrinsic to the biological cycle of humans, “a byproduct of life,” he said, it means that it will never disappear.
One in three people who read these lines will suffer from it. Massagué reminded us, and family members, friends, and colleagues who are sick immediately came to mind. Some will be saved. Others, no. “The disease is linked to the rest of each person's physiology.” So simple and complicated at the same time. This explains that the same therapy works in one person and fails in another, managing to circumvent or avoid immunity. “Cancer misuses the normal processes of our body. “Precisely that is the challenge of research,” continued the eminent doctor with a style typical of a school teacher.
Nothing in science comes fast enough for those who are today cancer patients, nor for their families. “Although science is the solution to our problems,” he added with an optimism that is difficult to refute and very contagious.
Stay with this idea: “We are turning cancer into a normal disease.” By normal, Joan Massagué referred to chronicle. A chronic illness, wow! Now we know that cancer will never disappear, but the objective is to surround it, making it medically normal, as happened with infectious diseases in the mid-20th century.
–When, doctor, when?
–I am better at predicting the past than the future.
This time Joan Massagué, 70 years old, did not say that in twenty years this horizon of the normalization of cancer will be reached. Yes, he has been heard holding it before. He didn't need it because he invoked hope again and again.
“Ending cancer means ending the tragedy, the frustration, the helplessness with which we have been living for a decade and a half.” Yes, there is hope even though the time of scientists does not correspond to the time of patients, nor to the pace of allocation of public and private resources to research and very expensive therapies that must be measured very well. the results.
The oncologist used history to make us notice how much knowledge has advanced. 30 years ago we only had chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Now there are many more precision therapies, in addition to immunotherapy, the promising liquid biopsy, and there is talk of preventing metastasis.
This Catalan who has lived in New York for 35 years (his accent gives him away) is dedicated to latent, invisible metastasis. In 2012 he changed the direction of his research: instead of treating metastasis, he was going to prevent it.
At this point Massagué once again made a herculean pedagogical effort and was well understood. When a tumor is diagnosed and operated on, the area is then irradiated in case any residue remains. If everything goes well, the doctor tells us that there are no sources of metastasis. Oh, that's great, that's it, right? No, it's not. There are no foci, but there may be seeds of metastasis, which the tumor had had time to spread already at the time of diagnosis. Then comes the damn relapse.
Forget about Massagué coming back. He will continue in New York focused on containing recurrent relapses. He doesn't want to appear as a hero, only as a mentor. And he already has his Masia all over the world, also in Barcelona, disciples who are outstanding in cancer. He believes that “if the immune system is taught to identify dormant cancer cells, it will prevent them from overcoming our defenses and causing metastasis to return with increasing force.” The first experimental drugs have already been discovered. It is a matter of time before Massagué declares victory. Without any modesty.
