Cancer treatment methods are not being applied properly: Nobel winning biologist

Currently associated with Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Centre, Harold E Varmus was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1989 along with virologist J Michael Bishop for discovering the cellular origins of retroviral oncogenes.(Representational image)

Countries with limited resources, such as India, should help their pharma industry make cancer drugs that are less expensive than medicines made by large international companies holding the property rights, feels Harold Eliot Varmus, an American Nobel Prize winning scientist.

Currently associated with Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Centre, Harold E Varmus was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1989 along with virologist J Michael Bishop for discovering the cellular origins of retroviral oncogenes.

In an exclusive interaction with Moneycontrol, Varmus, who is currently visiting India, said that the cost of cancer drugs and immunotherapies is a problem everywhere, especially in poor countries. While there may not be a simple solution to address the high cost, one way to tackle it is by ensuring wide availability of medicines that are off-patent, he said.

The celebrated scientist, who has been the director of the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute in the US, said that “stunning developments” in cancer research have taken place over the last few decades but it may still be a long time before cancer can be managed like a chronic disease for most patients.

“We understand the origins of cancer much more profoundly, we have new kinds of therapies that are based on understanding of the genetic underpinnings of cancer and the immunological responses to cancer, " said Varmus. “And those have had benefits for patients but cancer is still a dreaded, uncommon disease increasing in frequency in many places.”

He added that there are many different kinds of cancer that need to be understood individually.

Understanding cancer

Varmus also stressed that problems around cancer treatment ranged from a lack of full understanding of a very complex set of diseases, to the will and the finances of the healthcare system.

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“So, we are able to deliver what we have. For example, we have ways to protect patients against cancers that are induced by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), we have a good vaccine against that virus but it's not used as widely as it ought to be either in India or many other places,” he said.

“’And so there are problems that range from fundamental understanding of answers to applications of methods we already have available that we know are beneficial”.

Asked whether cancer treatment can reach a stage in the near future where it can be managed life-long like diabetes or hypertension, instead of being seen as a death sentence by most, Varmus said that it happens in some cases but may be complicated for others as cancer is not one disease.

“Some cancers have been managed as chronic diseases, because we have tools, therapeutic tools for doing that,” he said. “We also have ways to reduce the incidence of cancer by, for example, smoking cessation, and those are important tools for reducing the incidence of cancer. That’s beneficial in many countries where smoking rates have been reduced, but we are not fully effective in using those methods.

He also said that for finding effective treatments for various types of cancer, there needs to be a very wide approach to make progress.

“We made progress in the last 50 years, but 50 years is a long time and the progress has been -dramatic, but relatively slow,” said the scientist.