FINDING A cure for certain types of cancer could be progressed much more quickly if there was less regulation of clinical trials by ethics committees, according to Nobel Prize winner Dr James Watson, who was honoured in Cork yesterday.
Dr Watson, who together with Francis Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, said he believed that cures for certain types of cancers could be developed up to five times more quickly with less regulation of clinical trials.
“It demands doing the clinical tests faster with less restrictions. We’re terribly held back on clinical tests by regulations, which say that no one should unnecessarily die in a clinical test, but they’re going to die unless we do something radical,” he said. “I think the ethics committee are out of control and they should put it back in the hands of the doctors. There’s extraordinary red tape which slows things down. I think we can go five times faster without these committees,” he said.
Dr Watson, who was born in 1928 in Chicago of Irish and Scottish ancestry, was speaking in Cork, where he delivered the inaugural lecture at the Cork Cancer Research Centre at UCC prior to being awarded an honorary doctorate at the university.
Dr Watson is very hopeful that a cure for secondary or metastatic cancers will be found within the next 10 years, but he suggested that a cure is most likely to be found through multi-agent regimes rather than one specific treatment.
Dr Watson pointed out that some old ideas are now beginning to hold favour again, including research into the biochemical changes in cancer cells, and more specifically how they use glucose to make energy and how this might be targeted to kill cancerous cells.