“Extraordinary measures” is a heart-wrenching movie about a parent’s quest to save the lives of two dying children with Pompe disease. Starring Brandon Fraser (John Crowley) as the venture capitalist fathering the two children, and Harrison Ford (Robert Stonehill) as the aloof researcher with the science to curing Pompe, the story beautifully illustrates the many difficulties and challenges behind transforming basic science into a usable drug. 
Despite the financial risks, setbacks, frustration and tears, Crowley manages to orchestrate an incredible research effort to save his children, by first recruiting Stonehill, raising money, starting a company dedicated to research for Pompe’s disease, and finally merging with a company, “Genzyme”, whose efforts finally produced the life-saving drug for his children. 

 Can “Extraordinary Measures” be the story of hope for people suffering from life-threatening and incurable diseases like cancer? Or is this story merely the stuff of dreams, a reality only for the lucky or delusional? 

 Think about this in the perspective of cancer patients. Under their physician’s recommendations, they are given the usual regime of surgery, followed by the conventional radiation and/or chemotherapy. But conventional treatments are not always effective, because cancer cells have enormous capacity to evade these treatments. Months or sometimes years after treatment, some of these patients find themselves losing the battle, succumbing to a metastatic and rapidly growing tumor, and eventually ticking off the number of days they could live. 

 Why are there still so many cancer patients losing their battle? This is a discouraging fact given the millions of dollars funneled into the Cancer Society, Terry Fox Foundation, Breast Cancer Foundation and other organizations to support cancer research. Well, the money is definitely going into various cancer research hubs across the world. If you search “cancer” on PubMed, you get 2442635 publications. But for some reason, the vast majority of cancer patients don’t benefit from this research, with the exception of the lucky few who get enrolled into clinical trials. 

In response to Crowley’s incredible story in “Extraordinary Measures”, one cannot help but ask why cancer patients are not given this extraordinary option to save their lives. Are physicians really giving up on them too soon? Well, to be fair, physicians are specially trained to give the best treatment options available to their patients. Unfortunately, by pushing patients to take these conventional treatments, the doctors inadvertently minimize their patients’ eligibility for clinical trials. According to the clinical trial information page at the Canadian Cancer Society website, patients could be disqualified for any clinical trials simply because they have undergone surgery, or are undergoing conventional treatments. In order to be eligible, patients must stop all treatments for several weeks to recover from any side effects, before they can be considered for new treatment strategies in clinical trials; wasting valuable time that can often mean life or death for these patients. Rather than wasting time, cancer patients need to know more about what they are up against, and available treatment strategies to effectively fight the cancer. 

Pathologists who look at the cancers can tell you whether the cancer is benign or malignant, or whether it is at its early or advanced stage. The problem is they can’t tell you anything about the cellular components of the tumor, or the molecular drivers that might contribute to tumor progression or recurrence. This is why cancer researchers are now suggesting a customized cancer treatment strategy, where scientists can fully characterize the cellular and molecular features of the patient’s tumor, and come up with treatment regimes that can go after the root of the disease. Researchers can also keep an eye on the tumor’s response to the treatment, and to develop further treatment approaches to combat specifically resistant parts of the tumor that may contribute to recurrence. 

 After much proposal, this “extraordinary” research-based approach to treat cancer is far from being implemented. Cancer researchers are often not granted access to patients or their samples of their cancer tissue without prior ethical approval, which requires an incredibly slow process to obtain. Often scientists do not have much opportunity to connect with clinicians, making it difficult for them to establish a professional relationship with cancer patients. These obstacles are layered on top of the existing difficulties of getting new drugs validated and approved for use in clinical trials, and raising funds to cover the enormous costs of research. 

Yet in spite of these obstacles, Crowley’s story teaches us that perhaps better implementation of our society’s research resources is needed to succeed in our fight against cancer.