The Medical Advisor

Gendicine (recombinant human p53 adenovirus), developed by Shenzhen SiBiono GeneTech Co. Ltd., was approved in 2003 by the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) as a first-in-class gene therapy product to treat head and neck cancer, and entered the commercial market in 2004. The global cancer gene therapy market size was valued at USD 1.68 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20% from 2022 to 2030. The growth of the market is attributed to factors such as the growing demand for gene therapy and an increased incidence of cancer cases across the globe.  Gendicine is a biological therapy that is delivered via minimally invasive intratumoral injection, as well as by intracavity or intravascular infusion. The wild-type (wt) p53 protein expressed by Gendicine-transduced cells is a tumor suppressor that is activated by cellular stress, and mediates cell-cycle arrest and DNA repair, or induces apoptosis, senescence, and/or autophagy, dep...

I’m a smoker. I’ve smoked a pack a day for almost 20 years. Knowing all that I do about health and medicine, you’d have to think I’m either crazy or suicidal, right? Why would I carry on smoking veritable cancer sticks, day in day out, knowing all we do about the risks? I do not fear cancer. (Nor the other pathologies it can cause - but that’s a discussion for another day.) If I die of cancer one of these days, please feel free to put this right alongside my obituary and laugh at me, because it isn’t going to happen. One of the most insidious methodological switches that has been applied to modern medicine is a severe overreliance on statistical interpretations of trial data, to the exclusion of any significant consideration of proteomic interactions or mechanisms, which are instead relegated to curiosities of interest only to the scientists investigating them, with very little transference to the discovery and announcement of useful therapeutics. This switch has enabled the powers th...