Why I am hopeful for the cure

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http://killerboob.blogspot.com

 Firstly, the only way to cure breast cancer is to cure the stage IV patients. 2 years ago, I had a mammogram that was fine. So i was comfortable enough to get pregnant. midway through pregnancy, an aggressive IDC is found. mammograms and screening and awareness has inherent limitations, that throwing billions of well intentioned donations won't fix.

Government research budgets are being cut these days. Yet I am hopeful for the cure for metastatic breast cancer. Here are why:
1. Examples of highly effective and highly targetted drugs like xykori for small minority of ALK positive lung cancer patients, like gleevac and Herceptin.
2. TDM-1 is recycling an old highly toxic chemotherapy drug and attach it to Herceptin for better delivery and targetting of cancer cells. There are many cytotoxins that kills cancer cells, but majority are eliminated during phase I because of unacceptable toxicity. Imagine a future, where every subtype of cancer patients can use any toxins effectively delivered to cancer cell without systemic toxicity.
3. At the same time, cost of genomic analysis are dropping. When genomes can be effeciently sequenced at <$10000 (it is now!), there's no excuse not to collect the tumor samples and run sequence and collect information to better target. Old clinical trials for all drugs can potentially be re-evaluated for information on which subset of people responds better to certain therapies.   Not just the drugs that has 50% clinical response rate, but also the ones with 25%, 10% even 5% response rate.   Each may work 100% for a very small population, and they can be made available to this population. That's why it's important that patients donate their samples and clinical records to make sure good data is available in future.
4. 2 words: Stem cells. Imagine a future where every liver/lung metsters can grow their own liver from purified stem cells and retransplant.
5. fundamental research in metastasis and immune system. Even stage IV patients will benefit because if their current tumor is stopped from further metastasis, then the current tumors can be surgically removed and their chance for life will be significantly improved. What is lost in government funding needs to be replaced by private funding. And people need to be careful about what they fund but must not stop the funding.

I don't want to read more costly studies like "a needle in the ocean is an environmental factor in breast cancer occurence", I don't want to see more awareness/screening/education campaigns that costs billions of dollars, or pay $3000 for a commercial BRCA1/BRCA2 test that gives me minimal information.

If every patient participate in 1 noninterventional research study and share 1 patient record and participate in 1 well targetted interventional clinical trials, I have no doubt there will be a 95% cure for MBC and other MCs in 5-10 years.