10 Days left to help cure cancer ….. Where Precision Medicine misses the mark

Many thanks to the generosity of our backers we are now at $2677 pledged (67%) of our $4000 goal! With 10 days left in the campaign and with your help we will be able to test our new drug in cancer-prone mice and show the therapeutic benefit of inducing HEXIM1 for preventing cancer metastasis and spread of the disease.

We've been able to reduce our goal from the previous target through the kind assistance of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine's Translational Program which will help answer some of the later questions in the project – but we still need to raise the funds required for the actual drug testing itself in the mice.

You may have heard mention in the State of the Union speech last night of a 'Precision Medicine Initiative' and the potential to cure cancer and other diseases. Sounds great doesn't it! So there's no need for HEXIM1 inducing medicines since we will have all this genetically targeted stuff?? Well in reality, Precision Medicine is already here - $25 Billion of the $88 Billion global expenditure on cancer drugs every year is spent on biologic medicines that target a specific subset of one particular subtype of cancer. One well known example would be Herceptin for HER2 positive breast cancer.

The real problem is that these types of targeted medicine are both very expensive and also effective for only a very small subset of patients. This is actually one of the major cost drivers in our modern medical system and Pharma companies make profits on oncology drugs that they can't justify for other diseases.

TLDR: Precision Medicine may be cool and very precise, but it is neither cheap nor generally effective medicine.

So why doesn't Precision Medicine (a.k.a. Personalized Medicine) work? Mainly because the drugs are trying to directly turn off individual components of very complex pathways that cause cancerous growth. Turning off anything completely in biology is actually never simple. In contrast, HEXIM1 inducing drugs are unusual in that they turn up the level of HEXIM1, which then turns down a whole array of cancer driving genes (reviewed in our earlier lab notes). Turrning up to turn off … a most elegant cellular reset button. And no genetic 'Precision' needed …..

So please pledge a donation today and help us to achieve something important with this very novel, new and cool way of trying to cure cancer!

Many thanks – The Montano Lab