On the morning of Oct. 18, winner of national best award of progress in science and technology, an academician of CAE (Chinese Academy of Engineering)-- Zhenyi Wang gave an academic report of "The Challenge That Cancer Treatment Had Met" which showed his own opinion on the application and research field of genes, tumor vaccines and stem cells. He emphasized that the general idea of philosophy should be applied in the cancer treatment to make integrated therapy.
The Promising Novel Therapies
At the beginning, Academician Wang said modestly,"I am a little afraid to speak here at FUDA, because she has an intensive study on cancer treatment."
He had pointed out that even though cancer therapeutics had been studied for many years with various ways, however, most of the malignant tumors had poor response. Take gastric cancer for example, the median survival time is only 8 to 9 months with the newest treatment plan. Cancer treatments had met many challenges like chemotherapy was overused, tolerance and toxicity of chemotherapy drugs, they were questions still hard to solve.
In Zhenyi Wang's opinion, it's still quite difficult to let apoptosis cancer cells treat cancer at present. Some patients are afraid of gene therapy because of the induced leukemia, and now we have a declining number of the application of this therapy. However, cancer is still the biggest application field of gene therapy which has some research spaces. Some researches have shown that the effect of combined immunotherapy and radiotherapy is better than radiotherapy only.
It's not perfect to treat cancer only with conventional surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. We should start from the most essential part, on the base of conventional therapies, induce the apoptosis of cancer cells with targeted therapy. In that way, the tumor growth could be remarkably controlled and the median survival time could be prolonged. In Wang's opinion, integrative cancer therapy can be studied more deeply to find the targets, then with the help of other methods to work together to improve the efficacy.
Holistic View
At present, the cutting-edged technologies like tumor vaccines, research on cancer stem cells are being widely studied worldwide. They belong to the targeted therapy which directly or indirectly play a part in the cancer cells to control the tumor.
Vaccinal therapy is applied in patients with advanced hepatic cancer or other cancer with widespread metastases, but still in a researching and clinical tentative stage. Wang says, the vaccines in the vaccinal therapy are different from common vaccines, it could be some combined vaccines which could kill cancer cells in some ways by the specific immunity.
There are some opinions that the recurrence, metastases of cancer and drug resistances are related to the possible, very few number of cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cell therapy target on cancer stem cells and block up the motive force of tumor growth. Essentially speaking, it can effect a permanent cure.