David Agus: A new strategy in the war against cancer

www.ted.com Traditionally, David Agus explains, cancer treatments have had a short-sighted focus on the offending individual cells. He suggests a new, cross-disciplinary approach, using atypical drugs, computer modeling and protein analysis to treat and analyze the whole body.

[@calledout4437]

Andddd 12 years later since this video we're no further along.

[@MarkElDeiry]

At 5:25, Dr. Agus starts to discuss how it is absurd to classify cancer by body part. He suggests, it should rather be classified by which gene is over expressed or which protein is over presented. QUESTION: WHY is it not standard practice to define a complete genome and complete proteome of healthy cells and cancer cells as the first step in diagnosis and treatment of a suspected (or confirmed) cancer patient? From all I have read on the subject, all chemo-based and immunologically-based cancer treatments are dependent on the presence or absence of a particular protein on the targeted cancer cells. It is also evident that no single biomarker is present in ALL cancers found in a particular body part (rather, originating in a particular body part). The biomarkers present in one patient's pancreatic cancer will not be present in every patient's pancreatic cancer. There are a small handful of biomarkers that are present in a very large percentage of pancreatic cancers. But that is no comfort to the individual patient who is being given a chemo agent or immunological agent which targets that particular biomarker unless it is confirmed that THIS patient has that biomarker. It is odd that we are fully aware of these facts yet we continue to treat cancer patients without first getting a complete genome and proteome of the patient's healthy cells and the patient's cancer cells. It seems to be the most essential part of the puzzle and many people are suffering and dying for failure to perform a relatively routine test.

[@notaras1985]

that applies in all fields of science, not just cancer research. thinking our of the box, and bringing new minds coming from different fields to offer their ideas and different perspectives. even a company to thrive must have an array of different and creative minds and a dynamic rather than reductionist mindset. and certainly prevention is even more important than confrontation especially if you are too late.

[@BLFulle]

I hope to be a participant in the first Triple Negative Breast Cancer vaccine trial. That's 7 years after this video and it's only a trial but I'm excited and happy to participate if I am chosen.

[@briansmobile1]

I love the both the passion and humility that David Agus approaches his study. I feel both are necessary to progress and learning. Five stars.

[@Arcessitor]

Excellent.

[@AutodidacticPhd]

@Mishkafofer And Game Theory does a brilliant job of explaining all the problems in current medical research. It is most rewarding to research drugs that treat problems that are common in populations rich enough to pay for them. It is not beneficial to tackle problems that are rare, or that are more common amongst the poor. It is also preferable to make sure there is as little independent oversight and research as possible.

[@tankiawee]

Several posters have already commented on his misleading presentation. He plainly stated that they refused to use a placebo, which I'll take at face value, but which also raises serious questions about how to even evaluate his treatment. He had 20mins to make a presentation, that does not excuse his factual inaccuracy about cancer diagnosis. He brought up the ER/PR/HER2, these receptors and their role in breast cancer would be unknown without indepth research into the basic mechanisms of cancer.

[@912yos]

The last name Agus means A term that has been used to describe abnormal cells that come from glands in the walls of the cervix (the lower, narrow end of the uterus). These abnormal cells are found in a small number of Pap smears (a procedure used to detect cervical cancer) and may be a sign of more serious lesions or cancer.

[@DrCureAging]

Yeah. I agree we need to do both. I'm not sure that's what he's saying but if he is, then I agree.

[@AutodidacticPhd]

...basically, any academic researcher working on or with a chemical, technology or process that has medical significance is usually working under a private grant, and more often than not, the results they publish don't just effect renewal or loss of the grant, but whether or not they are still allowed to use the chemical or process. Saying academic and commercial labs aren't mutually exclusive is an understatement, and that is the problem.

[@BuoGoaty]

Thanks for informing. It feels like I really have nothing to add now tho.. Do'h!

[@speedyslime93]

A couple of incredible documentaries include 'run from the cure' and 'a beautiful truth'.

[@Itslvle]

It goes from amygdalin to prunasin to mandelonitrile to cyanide. Obviously other products emerge, but are unnecessary to mention here. If taken orally, it will be broken down into cyanide in the small intestine and in rather unpredictable amounts as it depends how much the other foods you've ingested contain beta-glucosidase. So it "fires" way too early. In addition to that, it's efficacy in cancer treatment hasn't really been shown in clinical trials.

[@frenzyfol]

I learned about all these ideas 10 years ago in university and they still haven't been as integrated into medicine as much as they should of been.

[@Itslvle]

He downplays the basic pathology a lot. He's claiming that the diagnosis just says breast cancer, that's it, and says that basic staining is the state of the art in clinical use. The grade and TMN make a difference. He mentioned HER2. In Finland it's standard practice to do the immunohistochemistry to find out if the breast cancer expresses ER/PR/HER2 as it highly affects the treatment, and I doubt the situation is much different in the US.

[@Jerkix]

We know HOW cancer develops. We DO know what MAKES a cell go mad. So accurate we've become with molecular biology techniques, that we can narrow it down to a single peptide change. Google: p53, RAS, Akt, EGF, BRCA, MTOR, SRC, MYC.. mutations to these are what causes cells to go "mad".

[@brummiebetty1989]

He is not claiming that individual proteins do not matter, but instead that these single proteins act within a given context; the combined action of all proteins together gives some specific outcomes that would not be possible if they were acting on their own. This is why he wants to look at the whole thing. If I were to relate this to what you say, forming a unified view is exactly what he aims to achieve.

[@nema151]

THANK YOU! i alwasy thought i must have been missing something when people i have brest/prostate/ext cancer ITS CANCER.

[@LemonLimeLaughter]

Actually, it is not straight up cyanide. I know what you are talking about though. It is a molecule that is composed partly of cyanide, so it is non toxic. But due to a chemical reaction, I forgot exactly how the whole process goes, the the cyanide becomes toxic when they absorb cancer cells. Therefore, acting as an anti-cancer molecule.

[@Jerkix]

I was actually thinking that.. not too much substance. Although I think the general gist is that we should be looking outside of realm of trying to target specific gene targets, and think more broadly (he used the example of that osteoporosis drug). The question I pose is - how do we know to use such drugs, when it has no direct impact on the things that makes cells cancerous? Difficult.

[@AutodidacticPhd]

@Mishkafofer I'm not paranoid. I'm at a university and I see it all the time. Someone I met who was using a drug in basic research, trying to find out what its actual mechanism is with small cell cultures (ie no medical application at all) got shut down just last month because the owner of the patent on the drug finally got it approved for sale... they shut him down because they were worried he might show that its effects are not what they assumed.

[@2SARAHBELL]

This is good

[@brummiebetty1989]

What he means is that research over the past few decades has focused on understanding in a reductionist way, ie to focus on individual proteins that mutate to cause cancer. Drugs coming out of this research have obviously shown some progress, but not enough to cure all cancers/diseases. This is why he aims to understand the "systems" of disease in a more holistic way because our body works as a whole rather than a single protein in a cetain cell.

[@veronicadredd22]

wow that was informative

[@Jerkix]

No, damage occurs all the time.. especially from oxidative stress. It doesn't matter how "strong" your immune system, the manner in which it detect antigens will mean that certain types of cancer simply cannot be defeated by your immune system. Finally, if you live long enough you will develop cancer - it just so happens most people die of other causes first. I can explain in more detail if you so want.

[@ciliaspippi]

Amen!

[@sugarkang]

love the new tedmed lectures. so glad to be out of india.

[@jamblinuk]

@Jerkix The mutation is the CONsequence of the cause. What causes the mutation? What causes the peptide change? That is the cause of cancer. take it or leave it

[@vechio80]

But it causes very high costs not just for the individual but for society. So i think take care worth it. How doctor said, cancer is the result of certain conditions, maybe we cant control cancer, but we can control conditions.

[@jamblinuk]

@Jerkix Yes, I am being serious

[@tankiawee]

First he tells us that cancer diagnosis is just examination under a microscope, which cannot be excused by the fact he was talking to a lay audience, because his entire point was that our diagnostics are crude. Which is untrue, as several poster have already pointed out.

[@freshhug]

His point that we should look for different views and search for ideas from other places then the doctors etc is a good one. The notion that young or people without higher education can't come up with good ideas is really wrong. It's in fact also a opressive attitude. Is all my years in schools wasted?? I am not going to let somone with less education talk. Thats a rly bad attitude and is in fact holding us back.

[@Waranoa]

Complex systems, I believe.

[@jamblinuk]

@BuoGoaty 500 characters is not enough - not even 5000 - therefore I kept it short and strait to the point. Your guess is wrong. I am not here to prove or provide anything to anyone - I am simply sharing. The information you can provide to yourself if you do some genetics research and consciousness research - how MATTER (body) and MIND (consciousness) interact. The prove is all of those that die of cancer (or almost died) 500 characters are gone and I havent even started

[@AutodidacticPhd]

"due to a chemical reaction, I forgot exactly how the whole process goes, the the cyanide becomes toxic when they absorb cancer cells." Yeah, not really. The chemistry is such that, as Itslvle pointed out, the enzymatic reaction that produces the cyanide happens in the gut. So oral delivery would be toxic, untargeted, and unpredictable... it also doesn't look like it would absorb well dermally or sublingually, so the only option left is injection... but most cancer cells can't catalyze it.

[@oneki]

@tankiawee you used a 23 min presentation to judge a research, dude that is what is flawed.

[@Jerkix]

The flip side is also high life expectancy - it's increased about 5 years in the same period. Cancer is a disease of the aged.

[@Zetimenvec]

if you look at the graph, it's a graph of obesity in women in 2008 at the top, and projected obesity in women in 2015

[@freshhug]

Information and education is good for bringing up idaeas but the problem is that many of the people who is good for reading and memorizing knowledge does not have the creative thinking required to form new ideas. A person who is not very interested of sitting behind a book for the majority of his life might have a better talent to think different. So don't take grades or education as a sign of creative thinking or intelligens.

[@Itslvle]

And that isn't even half of it. My advice is be very sceptical about what this guy says. No wonder there were hisses in the audience if this guy was talking at the American Association for Cancer Research conference.

[@benkullen2288]

He is so all over the place with this I don’t understand

[@charliecurilan4110]

he doesn't have an outline.

[@freshhug]

This is why I always laugh at people commenting on spelling errors, they are better off as parking officers then thinkers.

[@BuoGoaty]

And do you have anything to back your words? Guessing no otherwise you would have provided us with that information..

[@HigherPlanes]

If that happens 6 times, cancer develops. The reason the repair mechanism isn't working properly and our cells mutate is mostly due to our culture. Also. young children DO get cancer, but it's a different kind of cancer that develops after one mutation to DNA, like Leukemia.

[@DrCureAging]

I disagree with him. Understanding is the first step in controlling. How can we discover an unknown particle without first understanding the physics behind the particle accelerator. The reason we can't treat it is because we don't understand it!

[@oneki]

@tankiawee i am not saying that he is correct, you cannot judge the accuracy of his research objectively based on this 20mins presentation. it is the reason there is peer review. better still, you can request for his methodology and see if when you replicate the experiments you get the same result. TED talk is not giving you proof, it is just mind stimulation for those who might(not) be interested. Yes you might be right, however i think your proof cannot and should not be based on this talk

[@Itslvle]

Somehow I left the cell type out.

[@GetMeThere1]

I was excited and eager to listen to this talk. I kept waiting to hear something. Finally....I heard NOTHING of substance. A waste of time.

[@AutodidacticPhd]

@Mishkafofer Ok PAL, now you can take a listen. Just because you grew up in a system so backwards that the progress (made BEFORE private investment made academic medical progress nearly impossible) was a vast improvement, doesn't say squat about what is or isn't a good research model. Open ended research in independent, academic labs for a wide variety of medications or biological mechanisms gets shut down all the time now thanks to big pharma's paranoid obsession with money.

[@tankiawee]

You are right that the final merit of his research is to be determined by peer review of his methodology. But then, what precisely was he trying to tell us? He told us the FDA rejected his request to not use a placebo. As his audience, what do we take away from this anecdote? That the FDA is blocking his drug? That his methods are incorrect? What *does* this anecdote contribute to this talk? He presents no new ideas, other than a few buzzwords. On top of that, he repeatedly contradicts himself.

[@freshhug]

It's not true what he says in begining that we havent in general done any inpact in the war on cancer, We have and the percentage that we today can cure of cancer is like 50% better then 20 years ago. If the number of deaths he show where true then the only explanation is that the amont of cancer patients have increased. The environment has thus become more toxic etc.

[@HigherPlanes]

Cancer survival rate is high in America because we're one of the richest nations on the face of the Earth. How about cancer incidence rate?

[@Itslvle]

Oh trust me I'd have no problem with this presentation if he'd just be saying that we've taken some steps forward, but there's still a lot to be done. But as it stands now, I can't help but see this as misinformation.

[@n1bigdaddy]

It's *can't*.

[@lilperv]

TED makes KZbin worth it.Who sponsors TED?

[@speedyslime93]

As poorly composed as BallinTrollin sounds (rightfully so I think), he is right. Do some research on cannabis/hemp oil's ability to cure cancer. Thank you.

[@tankiawee]

Then, he proceeds to put down reductionism. Which means nothing, because he fails to outline what precisely his 'dynamic systems' approach brings to the table. The example of the arthritic drug was irrelevant. Sure, we know that drugs can bind to unexpected targets, that's why we have side effects that are revealed in in-vivo testing. What did that have to do with dynamic systems? Nothing. You cannot model something until you have a mechanistic understanding, which comes from "reductionism".

[@Hemphempmind]

no, you don't smoke the hemp oil. maybe if you can live with your ego anything is possible.

[@NaltaLife]

IS obese your subject cant be found in a preposition! 75% is a single quantity in your sentence, and therefore the correct verb would be IS, not ARE. .....BAM!

[@roidroid]

I don't see how what this guy is doing is any different to reductionism. He's breaking down a system into individually measurable components. Isn't that what redictionism is all about? He's counting proteins. He's doing reductionism.

[@12pimpinez]

yeah i saw that as well lol

[@kevinscales]

All this money given to all these research groups and all we had to do was eat apple seeds, doh! It seems that someone who majored in speech and communications figured it out in the 80's. Please be a little more skeptical

[@charliecurilan4110]

He's all over the place.

[@billythebrainsoftain]

I suppose you think socialized medicine would be better, eh? Because we don't have a free market in medicine. We have fascism in medicine. We have fascism in almost every industry in the United States. Do you really want the same bureaucrats that ban parents from smoking in a car with kids but put the same kids on a bus twice a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year that's 4 times more polluted with cancer causing carcinogens than the outside of the bus running our healthcare without competition?

[@ForestRangerFletcher]

There is something strange about his vocabulary in this talk. His choice of words seems unusual.

[@Jerkix]

lol - don't know whether you're being serious or not!

[@tankiawee]

Hell, his whole cancer genome atlas slide blows the rest of his speech out of the water. In short, he makes no valid points, not about the background of the issue, not about the problem, and certainly not about whatever he's trying to solve. Proteomics is inherently reductionist, and there's nothing wrong about that.

[@showtime6776]

If you're not making profits, then you're making losses, which is by definition wasteful, inefficient & just plain stupid. Greed is not the only motivating factor to human action thus there will still be doctors, though not everyone is cut out to be a good doctor, let alone oncologist. Anyway, the world would be better if we dedicate our time assisting 6 different cancer solutions instead of debating which economic policy works best. Note TED by William Li on angiogenesis.

[@ALPHAdog29]

Lul Wut

[@tetleydidley]

I don't think this guy really have any substance. He pretty much embellished his speech with a lot of buzzwords eg "move forward, thinking radically", and the need for a new "lexicon", as if changing terminologies will cure cancer. He carried on blabbering without really saying much about his work and research and how it can really help. Worst TED speech ever, I think.

[@2008Raw2008]

bozo! Please people, go read or listen on cd, or find on youtube. The China Study, by T. Collin Campbell. he'll tell you about cancer, causes, and cures... Also recommend watching the movie Healing Cancer from Within.

[@lilperv]

it was IBM pushing their innovative traffic-management system with a case-in-point example from Denmark...

[@lilperv]

yeah well, I think they were just trying to show off to us so as to add prestige to their name... because I don't think most of us are in the capacity of contracting IBM for congestion prices in some big city. Nevertheless, it was nice seeing that there are people out there who are trying to capitalize on making people's lives better, instead of on greediness or making people's lives terrible...