A RADICAL new approach to fighting cancer which avoids trying to wipe out the disease with chemotherapy and radiation was proposed by experts yesterday.
The aim of current treatments is to kill as many cancer cells as possible with the aim of destroying the disease.
But three leading cancer researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal yesterday question whether this is the best policy and call for a change in tactics.
They argue that cancer should not be seen as something simply to be eradicated a goal that is often difficult to accomplish.
Instead, they suggest a strategy of identifying defects in the regulatory systems controlling cell growth and trying to correct or override them.
While this may not eliminate cancer, the authors contend it may hold the disease in check and prolong life by many years.
Prof Harvey Schipper and Prof Eva Turley from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada and Prof Michael Baum from University College, London, suggest collecting and analysing cancer cells to identify all the possible molecular defects.
"In time, a library of cell colonies, representing the known metabolic defects associated with growth, invasion and metastasis (spread of the disease) would be available," they wrote.
The cells could be tested with new drugs to see if it is possible to correct their particular abnormalities. Then, when a patient is diagnosed with a disease like breast cancer, some of the cancerous tissue would be collected and the cells screened to identify any cancer causing defects.
Since there is normally a variety of cells in a cancer, treatments would target the defects of the most aggressive cells.
Patients could then be monitored to see if the treatments have tamed the cancer. Should the tumour resume growing, the cancer cells would be analysed again and the relevant defects treated.
The researchers conclude: "We are not alone in the belief that the killing model, whilst having offered substantial advances, is not likely to lead to cure."
"Where apparent cure is achieved, there is good evidence that other mechanisms are responsible, and that they appear to be regulatory. The emerging sense that cancer is a potentially remediable aberration in the continuum of normal cellular and tissue regulation opens a range of therapeutic possibilities.
"We are not proposing a cure, but the operational framework for putting into effect a regulation based model."
. An appeal court yesterday backed a mother who refused to accept an order that she must return her child back to Britain for a life saving liver transplant.
Judges described their ruling as "desperately difficult" but agreed that decisions affecting the life of children must lie with parents to whom their care is "entrusted by the case hinged on what was in the best interests of the 15 month old boy, who was taken abroad by his parents, both health care professionals, by coincidence just before a liver became available for transplant. The child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has been given a maximum 18 months to live if he does not have the transplant.
But the parents believed the boy would suffer months of pain after an operation from which he may not survive, or which would necessarily prolong his lite.