Lec 31 MIT 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004
Thanksgivings. We're talking today about rational medicine, and really what we're talking about is an understanding of the molecular biology of disease has actually helped to revolutionize the new science of therapeutic medicine. And here, more often than not, the discussions are focused around cancer. And so, I will therefore talk about an interesting story, vis-Ã -vis the modern treatment of cancer, and how our understanding of the molecular biology of the disease really helps in developing radically new kinds of therapies. By way of background, let's just mention that most of the chemotherapeutics that we use today to treat cancer were developed over the last 40-50 years at a time when the molecular and biochemical defects inside cancer cells were totally obscure. And therefore, to the extent that one developed chemotherapeutics, they were developed simply empirically, trial and error. For example, some of the most e...