When my father was diagnosed with cancer at the most advanced stage, Stage IV, a member of the Palliative Care Unit staff asked him what he thought. “When it’s your turn, it’s your turn,” he replied. Indeed, there is an element of chance. But there is also a great deal of science involved.
As you read these lines, your cells are dividing, and every time a cell divides, it has to read a DNA molecule containing more than 3 billion base pairs. As we age, this amazing and nearly perfect reading machine—known as the DNA replication machinery—begins to deteriorate, leading to the accumulation of mutations in our cells. Often, these mutations occur in parts of the gene that are not considered relevant to normal cell division and growth. In those cases, we can rest easy. The problem arises when these mutations or reading errors occur in a gene that is important for normal cell division and multiplication.
In that case—which, for my father, was a colloquial expression of resignation and stoicism—an abnormal proliferation of our cells is triggered. This is what we call cancer, a common denominator for up to 200 different diseases affecting our cells, most of which are very different from one another. If these mutations accumulate in the wrong places in our DNA, then the diagnosis that no patient wants to hear already has a name.
Therefore, we cannot prevent the development of some form of cancer over the course of our lives. What we can do, however, is “reduce the odds” that chance—as my father used to say—deals to our bodies. Habits such as being overweight due to a sedentary lifestyle and/or a poor diet, alcohol consumption, or smoking and its carcinogens (which are responsible for more than 30% of tumors and about 15 different types of cancer) increase the likelihood that cellular mutations will occur in dangerous areas of our DNA. Consequently, we must be fully aware of the role that risk prevention can play. About 50% of current cancers could be prevented by changing our lifestyles.
Medical advances help us live longer, but longer life expectancy increases the likelihood that we will face cancer. In the European Union, 31% of men and 25% of women will be diagnosed with cancer before reaching the age of 75; cancer is currently the second leading cause of death worldwide, surpassed only by cardiovascular disease.
In an era when almost all of us are aware of the growing prevalence of cancer (and when efforts are being made worldwide to combat this group of diseases by seeking to reduce the side effects of treatments and improve patients’ quality of life), industrial property rights play a fundamental role in cancer research. Accurate diagnosis, effective treatment, and multifaceted approaches—the best medical weapons against the disease—are not a matter of chance, but rather the result of advances in biomedical technology.
Patents are exclusive rights granted to inventions that are new, inventive, and have industrial applicability. In exchange for these exclusive rights (which allow companies to recoup their investment and finance future research), all patent applications are published, thereby revealing the technical details of the advancements they contain. Therefore, intellectual property rights not only protect these innovations but also attract investors and foster collaboration and technology transfer between research institutions and industry. It’s a win-win situation. The person who makes a new breakthrough wins, and the rest of us benefit as a result: the pharmaceutical and medical sectors, the public sector, and the general population.
February 4 marks World Cancer Day. To mark the occasion, the European Patent Office published a new study,“https://link.epo.org/web/publications/studies/en-patents-and-innovation-against-cancer-study.pdf,” which highlights how oncology-related inventions have increased by more than 70% between 2015 and 2021. This percentage was calculated based on the number of international patent families (applications that protect the same invention, including a published international patent application, a patent application published by a regional patent office, or patent applications published by two or more national patent offices). In addition, the European Patent Office has launched a free-access platform, Technologies combatting cancer | Epo.org, where users can access the latest patent applications grouped by diagnosis, prevention and early detection, treatment, etc., thus providing an extremely useful tool for staying up to date and thereby promoting knowledge transfer and faster progress in this field.
The European Patent Office report highlights that, since the 1970s, more than 140,000 inventions related to cancer have been published. It also notes that, between 2015 and 2021, the annual number of international patent families increased by more than 70%, which equates to an annual growth rate of 9.34%. All this growth in innovation has been accelerated by advances in biotechnology and information and communication technology (ICT), as well as increased investment, international collaboration, data sharing, and regulatory incentives. Technologies such as gene therapy, non-coding nucleic acids, immunotherapy, and targeted therapies are revolutionizing cancer treatment and care. In addition, advances in cancer diagnosis, such as liquid biopsies, are showing 20% annual growth among international patent families. These biopsies make it possible to detect circulating tumor DNA in the blood, among other things, and represent the most active area in biomarker patents, with more than 2,000 international patent families in 2021, thereby improving early detection rates—which are essential so that many patients, like my father, do not receive what amounts to a death sentence along with their diagnosis.
The United States stands out as the undisputed leader in oncology-related innovation, accounting for nearly 50% of all international patent families filed from 2002 to 2021. The 27 Member States of the European Union rank second, with an 18% share. Spain ranks among the top 10 most innovative European countries in the field of cancer, coming in ninth with 1,539 international patent families filed over the past two decades, behind more active countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.
In Spain, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) stands out, with 184 international patent families filed. Universities and public research organizations make an impressive contribution to this effort, filing one out of every three international patent families. This highlights a trend: pharmaceutical companies are increasingly dependent on basic and preclinical research from universities and public research organizations.
Cancer treatment technologies encompass a wide range of methods and tools. Among them are traditional approaches, such as surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, which have been used for many years and continue to be studied to further increase their effectiveness and reduce their side effects.
Having accompanied patients to the chemotherapy unit several times, you think about the will to live that we all have and how brave the patients are as they undergo treatment without knowing whether that cycle will continue to be effective or not; knowing that the treatment affects both cancerous and healthy cells, and that each component administered to them can cause various side effects such as weakness, neuropathy, anemia, diarrhea, mouth sores, cuts on the fingers, extreme dryness of the skin, or some permanent damage to various organs. These are a range of very intense feelings and sensations for those “on the outside,” which cancer patients learn to put into perspective in those treatment rooms.
The normal reaction upon receiving a cancer diagnosis is to start looking for information on the subject, reading articles, checking survival statistics, and learning about treatment techniques… Unfortunately, the reality is very different. There are many types of technology still under development and undergoing clinical trials, such as immunotherapy (with modified natural killer cells standing out as strong candidates for the development of universal therapies), targeted therapy, and other biological approaches—such as direct elimination, gene therapy, non-coding nucleic acids—as well as alternative treatments, such as radiolabeling or alternating electric fields for brain tumors. These technologies aim to understand the molecular and genetic mechanisms of cancer and to use the immune system or specific agents to combat it. It’s as if they were helping the human body fight these harmful mutations on its own. One example of this, which is advancing at full speed, is vaccines that recognize tumor neoantigens—tumor-specific antigens—which could become a potential treatment for different types of tumors and make treatment accessible to a larger number of patients. Undoubtedly, these are all promising technologies, but they are still in the research or approval phase or are not yet available to all patients or for all types of cancer.
Just a month ago, an article was published presenting the results of the largest genome sequencing program for cancer. This combined analysis of genomic and clinical data from 13,000 cancer patients makes it clear that genome sequencing can help tailor treatment approaches for patients. Information and communication technologies related to cancer—which play a very important role in its diagnosis and treatment, particularly through the field of bioinformatics—can also help identify biomarkers or targets for drug development. This is the fastest-growing technology sector in terms of the number of patent applications filed. Thanks to their ability to process and analyze large datasets, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data enable us to take more precise and personalized approaches to cancer treatment, as well as gain a better understanding of its genetic and molecular basis.
Looking a little further into the future of AI, it offers enormous potential for the rapid and accurate identification of cancer types, stages, drug resistance, and genetic characteristics through the use of machine learning algorithms. These advances are essential for improving outcomes, enabling personalized treatment plans, and monitoring disease progression—and innovators are well aware of this, as the number of patent applications in this sector of oncology has grown impressively since 2015 (particularly in the United States and China).
Therefore, we can be confident that tumor analysis tools and diagnostic methods will continue to advance and that, thanks to them, we will be able to anticipate cancer, detect it at an earlier stage, minimize cases like my father’s, and ultimately manage or treat this entire group of diseases we call cancer.
All of these goals are within the reach of research, but achieving them will require significant resources and the collaboration of everyone involved in this progress. The more resources we can secure for research, the less time it will take us to reach these goals. Cancer affects us all, and therefore it is our responsibility to make these advances a reality as soon as possible.
My father, as a true innovator, nuclear physicist, and OECD diplomat, was always very enthusiastic about all the patents, studies, and articles I told him about, and he took pride in the fact that his daughter might, in part, be involved. He knew he wouldn’t live to see these innovations applied to his own treatment, but he firmly believed that, in the not-too-distant future, advances in oncology would be decisive—advances significant enough to make it possible to challenge cancer and even defeat it.
May this article serve as a tribute and an expression of my deepest gratitude to everyone diagnosed with cancer (no one truly knows how strong you are—and each of you overcomes it in your own way!), family members (having been one of them myself until not long ago), researchers, healthcare workers, volunteers, investors, and everyone who makes it possible for us to stand up to cancer more and more every day.
Marina Reig, Associate at ELZABURU
Posted on the AseBio Blog: Cancer: We've Hit It, and Soon We'll Defeat It! | AseBio