[melling]

Pancreatic cancer is "hard to fight" because it is seldom detected early, but at a very late stage.

I heard Craig Venter once say that the cure for cancer is early detection. Wish I could find the video.

[okket]

(a bit tangential, not directly related to the special case of pancreatic cancer, maybe in this case early detection provides better results)

Early detection is double-edged sword: It is very hard to tell in early stages if the cancer develops into harmful variants and a small false positive error can have drastic consequences, if applied on scale [1]. The result is that many undergo unnecessary therapy with 100% harmful consequences (not life threatening, but permanent damage like removed organs/sterility).

See also: "The Case Against Early Cancer Detection"

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-c...

I'd put my money (research) rather on better treatment than earlier detection.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xlOm2wPAA

[melling]

It sounds like we need better non-invasive early detection. Tests where you can monitor the progress. Simply saying "we've got some early tests that aren't very helpful" doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving the tests.

Also, i'm not sure why we can't have both: better early detection and better treatments.

[shanacarp]

Pathways genomics is actually in clinical trials for blood tests to detect very very early masses that won't show up on scans.

One of the vps from Google's moonshot division,Jeff Huber, just left to head up a company that is a spinout of illumina, called Grail

No affiliation, but they have a bunch of interesting software jobs open after looking at thier site

http://newton.newtonsoftware.com/career/CareerHome.action?cl...

[yaakov34]

That's not really true for pancreatic cancer. It is absolutely notorious for escaping even when it's detected early, and even after a (seemingly) complete resection. This was in fact Randy Pausch's case: he had a resection with negative margin (meaning no cancer detectable on the surfaces from which the tumor was cut) and negative lymph nodes. For most cancers, his chances of survival would have been excellent, but not for pancreatic cancer. I remember at the time he wrote that it was a 50:50 proposition, but it's actually a lot worse. We don't know why this happens - it probably has to do with early metastasis by very small clumps of cells, or even individual cells.

This is one reason nobody recommends widespread screening for pancreatic cancer - apart from the inevitable false positives and so on. We currently don't have anything very wonderful to offer even to people in whom it was detected early, although it does improve the chances somewhat.