A new, three-part documentary begins tonight on public television. The subject is cancer, and the executive producer is Ken Burns.
“Our film project, The Emperor of All Maladiesis about as close to the bone as filmmaking gets for me. There was never a moment in my awareness as a human being that I didn’t know something was desperately wrong with my mother. She died when I was 11, almost 12 years old. “
The program features research scientists and doctors.
“I went to medical school from ’48 to ’52, and we were told you don’t tell patients that they have cancer because it’s inhuman, it would be cruel to do so.”
It also profiles patients who fight, heroically, by taking part in clinical trials.
“It looks like virtually everything is gone. You’ve saved my life, and I just feel so lucky.”
Ken Burns says now was the time to make this film.
“I’m not a scientist. I don’t know whether this will all pan out, but there’s a sense, a kind of palpable energy and excitement, that we may be on the cusp of some new and radical treatments and therapies that will change our relationship to the disease.”
At Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater, hundreds will gather for the premiere – among them Dr. Tom Loughran, Director of the Cancer Center at UVA. He says the age of destructive treatments that killed both cancer cells and health cells may be coming to an end.
“That’s been really successful. I mean in the last 20 years or so the number of patients surviving cancer at five years, which is a good benchmark for cure, has really gone from about 40-60% of all cancers.
Now, however, doctors may do better with targeted therapies made possible by our ability to genetically analyze cancer cells.
“Targeted therapy means to develop drugs specifically to turn off that protein that’s abnormally turned on.”
Also showing great promise, he adds, are treatments that spark our own immune systems to fight the disease.
“This is the other great advance – harnessing the power of the immune system to fight cancer , recognizing that the cancer cell has put brakes on the immune system, so a lot of us have come up with new drugs that turn on the immune system.”UVA is playing an important role in the field of nano-technology, with scientists, engineers and doctors finding novel ways to deliver killer drugs only to cancer tumors.
“We have these very small particles – smaller than the size of an individual cell. We engineer them to have drugs inside them. So we give those to the patient. Those nano-particles distribute into the cancer cells and then literally blow up inside the cancer cell, releasing directly to the cancer cell the new therapies, and we just have received approval from the FDA to treat patients with nano-particles, and so that new study will be enrolling patients within the next six months here at UVA.”
Admission to the Paramount is free, and from 6:30 to 9 the public is invited to discuss current studies with UVA doctors, and watch live interviews with Katie Couric; Ken Burns; Sharon Percy Rockefeller and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book on which the documentary is based. Then, on April 9, the Paramount will host a free lecture series on cancer research at UVA.
