Widespread hype gives false hope to many cancer patients.
Widespread hype gives false hope to many cancer patients
After Michael Uvanni’s older brother, James, was diagnosed with a deadly form of skin cancer, it seemed as if everyone told the family what they wanted to hear: Have hope. You can beat this, and we are here to help.
The brothers met with doctors at a half-dozen of the country’s best hospitals, all with impressive credentials that inspired confidence.
“I thought they were going to save him,” said Michael Uvanni, 66, an interior designer.
Although scientists have made important strides in recent years, and many early-stage cancers can now be cured, most of those with advanced cancer eventually die of their disease.
For Uvanni, hope gave way to crushing disappointment when his brother’s health declined and he died from metastatic melanoma in 2014.
“You get your hopes up, and then you are dropped off the edge of a cliff,” said Uvanni. “That’s the worst thing in the world.”
Caregivers like Uvanni can suffer prolonged grief and guilt if their loved ones are riddled with side effects and don’t survive as long as the family expected, noted Holly Prigerson, co-director of the Center for Research on Endof-Life Care at Weill Cornell Medical College.
For decades, researchers have rolled out new cancer therapies with great fanfare, announcing that science has at last found a key to ending one of the world’s great plagues, said Dr. Vinay Prasad, an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. When such efforts fail to live up to expectations, the cancer world simply moves on to the next big idea.
Hyping early scientific results — based on lab tests or animal studies — can attract investors that allow researchers to continue their work. Positive results can lead biotech firms to be bought out by larger drug companies.
“It’s in the interest of almost every stakeholder in the health system to be optimistic about these therapies,” said Dr. Walid Gellad, co-director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.
“While many people are trying to make patients’ lives healthier and longer and better, there are others that are exploiting their vulnerability,” said Dr. Leonard Saltz, chief of the gastrointestinal oncology service at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Others argue that the excitement about cancer research is justified. A spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group, said cancer patients have good reason for optimism.
“We continue to see great strides in identifying the genetic mutations and related factors that can drive the seemingly random formation of abnormal cells in cancer,” spokeswoman Holly Campbell said in a statement. “In the last decade, we’ve seen a number of scientific advances transform the landscape of many cancers.” Success or not?
For more than a decade, the Food and Drug Administration approved no new treatments for metastatic melanoma. Patients typically died within a year of diagnosis.
Researchers have tested immunotherapies against a variety of tumors, leading to approvals in lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and others.
Such success has led doctors to label cancer immunotherapy as a “game changer.” Newspapers and magazines call it a “breakthrough.” And hospitals laud them as “a miracle in the making.”
Yet these treatments — which were initially assumed to be gentler than chemotherapy — can provoke fatal immune system attacks on the lungs, kidneys, heart and other organs.