: re: F.D.A. Regulator, Widowed by Cancer, Helps Speed Drug Approval

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:59 PM
Subject: re: F.D.A. Regulator, Widowed by Cancer, Helps Speed Drug Approval
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   For decades, because the treatment options were so draconian, the
best practice in cancer treatment was to do nothing until the cancer
was far-developed and plainly life-threatening.  The exceptions were
growths on the skin and on the gut that could be found and excised
with little risk.  Great progress has been made in cancer research in
the last dozen years, but treatment has lagged. Even therapies that
are well-tolerated are not even tried except in a clinical population
that's  on death's door. Therapies that might stop a cancer driven by
one mutation aren't even tried except on patients that are already
dying because their cancers have accumulated many mutations. This was
demonstrated for those who have eyes to see in the case of Gleevec,
but--although is spurred a great deal of research and many new drug
candidates--it has not yet changed how drugs are tested or approved.
    Until we start treating pre-cancerous conditions in the rest of
the body as aggressively as we do in skin and gut, we will go on
wasting the results of most of our cancer research.
Barry Haskell Levine




http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/us/politics/fda-regulator-widowed-by-cancer-helps-speed-drug-approval.html?_r=0