Armstrong visits cancer facilities in Texas
DARPA’s James H. McDonough, director of the Center for Energy Research, in Houston, has been promoting advanced cancer drugs, including those inspired by cancer treatment.
According to an interview McDonough conducted with the Dallas Morning News published Friday, McDonough sai???d that while he hasn’t decided whether to run, he is already in talks with several ??????pharmaceutical companies who are interested in his efforts, including Novartis and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (TEVA), which produces the treatment Pembrolizumab. McDonough said he expects a major advance in treatment and that it will be a long and difficult process.
According to McDonough, the drugs could be produced and marketed within five years.
“The biggest thing they’re going to look at is: If we can make them affordable,” he said.
McDonough’s hope is that the cancer patients who might benefit from such a treatment can be brought into the community via private efforts by friends or through philanthropy, he said.
Pembrolizumab, a targeted drug specifically targeted at P.O.I. cancer cells, targets specific cancer cells and may be a potential candidate for cancer therapy. The most popular type of metastatic aggressive melano?????ma is P.O.I. type 2, which is found in about 10 percent of P.I.I. patients. Pembrolizumab has so far shown efficacy in five patients and has so far been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment in cancer patients as well.
However, as it stands now, it is only effective in two areas of P.I.I: the advanced stage of metastatic disease and melanoma. Pembrolizumab was developed specifically to target those tumors.
“These are hard-to-to-treat cancer metastases,” McDonough said of Pembrolizumab. “It’s so expensive, it’s hard-to-treat and it’s not very specific, so we thought we’d get some people excited, and that helped our research.”
After he visited cancer treatments in Texas, where he met with some of them, McDonough went to a hospice in McLean, Virginia, where he spoke with patients, according to the interview. He told the Daily News he did not ask patients what their cancer had done to them and that he wanted to help patients understand why the