An argument for discovery-driven research: from physicist to cancer researcher.

Abstract

My colleagues and I recently reported what may be an inexpensive and non-toxic method to prevent most if not all early relapses in breast and other cancers [1]. However, as a bizarre development, what could be a major medical advance turned into a researcher’s nightmare because with the current drug development business model there seems to be no way to conduct expensive confirmatory clinical trials of an inexpensive therapy. This counterintuitive situation was brought to the attention of Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jake Bernstein from ProPublica—a non-profit investigative journalistic organization. In the US and Europe, newspapers are being financially squeezed by news reporting on the internet. As a result, old fashioned investigative journalism is practiced much less frequently than in prior times. ProPublica was formed in an attempt to fill that gap. Bernstein investigated this situation and found that there are additional low cost treatment strategies that may also prevent relapse but are in the same financial predicament. Bernstein wrote a report on this issue that was published on their website [2]. My (only partially planned) personal role as a colon cancer patient and breast cancer researcher was used by Bernstein as an aid in discussing what have been named financial orphan cancer therapies. Since publication of the ProPublica report I have been asked on several occasions to explain in more detail how my roles as patient and researcher developed and how this relates to financial orphan therapies. I would like to take this opportunity to explain this improbable development.I was trained as an experimental physicist at the University of Chicago. That fine school has a strong theoretical history and even experimentalists are expected to be able to use computations to augment their experiments. About eight years after getting my PhD, I was working at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when my good friend Robert Wardwell’s wife was diagnosed with gastric lymphoma. Wardwell knew medical oncologist Jack Speer for many years and wanted to do something to help his wife. He organized a small study group consisting of himself, me, Dr Speer and Victor Petrosky—another HP physicist. (Cont.)