“What is it that decides what organs shall suffer from cancer?”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, the renowned oncologist, talks about the need to re-evaluate how we treat diseases
(I have a huge nerd crush on the guy!)
Existing model of disease treatment : “Have disease, target it, kill disease”
The dominance of this model is due to the ‘antibiotic introduction’
In this, the chemical would course through the body, lock into the target and turn it off.
So seductive was the idea that we have tried to replicate the model over and over.
It has worked but only partly.
If we take the universe of all chemical reactions in the body (~1M), the fraction of these reactions that can be targeted by pharma remains minuscule at 250.
250
The rest is ‘chemical darkness’.
Only 0.025% of the reactions are thus targeted by this lock-and-key mechanism.
It raises fascinating questions about the future –
#1 Could the medicine be a cell and not a pill
#2 Could it be an organ grown outside of the body
#3 Could these be stored? Or can it be grown separately for each person?
#4 Could medicine be an environment? Could we patent this?
Thoughts?
#RethinkingMedicine
#reviewswithranjani