Cancer is a disease that everyone talks about, but the current level of medical treatment, the conventional treatment for cancer is very limited and the degree of cure is not high, and the process of treatment is also very painful for patients.
But in the frontier field of medicine, there is a cell therapy called CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor), which deliberately changes the mode of cancer treatment, without the need for hair loss, and does not need to endure the body's painful reaction?
Let's move on......
1. Successful cure?
When CAR-T cell therapy was first clinically studied in the United States in 2010, three patients with advanced leukemia who had been sentenced to death by conventional cancer treatment were in remission and control after this new therapy, and there was no recurrence for the next six years.
This cell therapy is a new type of precision-targeted therapy that uses genetic modification technology to activate specific T cells and attach CAR (tumor chimeric antigen receptor) to new T cells, which then gain the ability to recognize tumor cells, which can travel around the body to destroy tumor cells and cure cancer.
More than 10 years after the emergence of this technology, there has been no successful cure in the mainland, just when people gradually forget about this treatment method that only exists abroad.
In 2022, Ms. Su (pseudonym), a lymphoma patient in Anhui, mainland China, before receiving stem cell therapy, only chemotherapy could prolong her life. This "lingering" lifestyle made Aunt Su want to give up her life for a while......
When Aunt Sue learned that there was a treatment called "CAR-T cell therapy", she decided to give it a try.
In the Affiliated Hospital of the University of Science and Technology of China, she was injected with CAR-T reagent, everyone anxiously waited for the results, time passed little by little, half a month, the activity trend of cancer cells in Ms. Su's body decreased significantly, a month later PET-CT examination showed that all cancer cells in Ms. Su's body were cleared, CAR-T cell therapy made Ms. Su regain her life, and she was the first patient in Anhui Province to be cured of cancer through stem cell injection!
I don't know how many people paid attention to this encouraging news at the time, and when many people learned about the cost behind the treatment, it turned off thousands of cancer patients......
2. High treatment costs and many adverse reactions
The cost of CAR-T treatment is about 1.2 million to 1.29 million, which is only the cost of one needle, and if you take into account the subsequent course of treatment, the cost will increase significantly.
The prices of CAR-T drugs such as axileucel, relma-cel, and ig-autoleucel, which have been marketed in mainland China in recent years, are more than one million. Many people joke that "one medicine, one suite", such a price is really astronomical for the families of many cancer patients in the mainland, and only a handful of people can afford it.
Why is CAR-T cell therapy so expensive?
First of all, according to the different physique of each patient, CAR-T needs to be specially customized, the early laboratory test should collect a large number of physiological data of the patient as a reference, the time required to cultivate a single reagent takes 2~4 weeks, and the ingredients of the medicine for personal use are also different, which requires multiple complicated laboratory tests and the adjustment of the proportion of medication, and the cost required during this period alone is hundreds of thousands, and large-scale mass production cannot be realized, and the cost will naturally not be reduced.
At present, this treatment method is still in the forefront of the medical field, the standard of the production process has not been quantified, the requirements for various production links are very high, and the instruments and equipment required are also quite high, and the R&D enterprises without strong funds cannot afford it.
Some scholars have pointed out that the proportion of overloaded responses to CAR-T therapy is very high, and according to the clinical data obtained so far, the stem cell synthetics extracted by CAR-T technology are far from being 100% accurate to the corresponding cancer cells.
In practice, stem cells with tumor chimeric antigen receptors have a chance to attack normal tissue cells, triggering cytokine syndrome and worsening the patient's condition.
In addition, according to each person's constitution, patients may also have adverse reactions (including, but not all): generalized edema, hypotension, high fever, dyspnea, abnormal liver function, etc.
In addition to adverse reactions, there are also a series of sequelae after the treatment process, such as neurotransmitter release syndrome, hematologic side effects, infection, cerebral edema, ...... All these prove that there are many uncontrollable factors in stem cell therapy, which cannot completely guarantee the life safety of subjects.
In summary, the high cost of treatment and complex side effects have prevented CAR-T as a treatment technology from being promoted in mainland China.
3. To prevent cancer, it is necessary to prevent cancer early, know it early, and treat it early
Instead of talking about how to treat cancer, let's learn how to prevent cancer. Not having cancer is the biggest responsibility for your body!
The International Union Against Cancer has proposed the concept of tertiary prevention of malignant tumors: preventable, curable, and alleviating suffering.
Prevention is the top priority here, because cancer is closely related to our lives, and what we eat, use, and even the air we breathe can determine our probability of developing cancer.
For middle-aged and elderly people, 80% of their daily routines are related to cancer, and behaviors such as frequent smoking and drinking are very harmful to the lungs and digestive tract. Eating a varied diet, exercising properly and feeling good are all very important factors in preventing cancer.
Not only that, but we can also go to the hospital to assess which aspects of cancer are more susceptible to cancer according to our different occupations and living environments.
Routine physical examination can give us many answers: "X-ray" can help us check whether there is stomach cancer or esophageal cancer; "ultrasound" can detect whether cancerous changes occur in the liver, gallbladder, kidneys and other parts; "MRI" is an important reference index for the diagnosis of cancer in our nerve center and blood vessels; as well as various endoscopies in internal medicine, gastroscopy, colonoscopy, and thoracoscopy can intuitively observe the physiological reactions of various organs in the body......
In addition to these physical indicators, there is also a genetic factor and immune factors that cause cancer.
Although the risk of carcinogenesis caused by genetic factors is small, the threat of this genetic predisposition and susceptibility should not be underestimated, and if there is a history of genetic disease infection in the family, it is necessary to pay attention, such as patients with familial hereditary intestinal polyps and patients infected with hepatitis B virus, the incidence of carcinogenesis of body organs after the age of 40 is as high as more than 80%.
There are also immune factors, congenital or acquired immune deficiencies make the body prone to cancer, normal immune cells can remove some cancerous cells, and people with deficient immunity can not do this, once cancer occurs in the body, it will be uncontrolled, there is a risk of cancer spreading.
A comprehensive understanding of the factors and risks of cancer is the method we must stick to in the first hurdle of fighting cancer!
As for the million anti-cancer injections, we must look at it with an optimistic and positive attitude, believe in the development of medicine, and believe that in the future, the possible inclusion of national medical insurance and the reduction of the cost of patent licensing will make these niche anti-cancer drugs benefit the public after all.