TED talks about Angiogenesis

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In February, the TED2010 conference featured a series of "big ideas," ranging from how much money a person needs to make to be happy to how the ukelele can stop wars. One of the ideas featured was from William Li, president and medical director of The Angiogenesis Foundation. Li's talk ("Can we eat to starve cancer?") focuses on how a lot of foods and beverages could help prevent cancer through the substances they offer, which are the same substances in the 11 FDA-approved anti-angiogenesis drugs. (Anti-angiogenesis is a type of targeted therapy, which stops tumors from making new blood vessels, keeping them from growing or causing tumors to shrink.) On the TED blog, they offer a list of some of these foods and beverages.TED (standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "ideas worth spreading." And while angiogenesis, and the importance of good nutrition, are ideas definitely worth spreading, we should all be wary of putting too much stock in the research Li shares. Yes, many of these foods and beverages contain substances that have anti-angiogenesis capabilities. And yes, one day we possibly could "eat to starve cancer." But a lot of this research is still very preliminary – either observational or they're animal studies. There has yet to be any substantial research showing these food and beverages are beneficial for humans with cancer. Plus, we can't exactly directly compare green tea, berries and dark chocolate to anti-angiogenesis drugs, like Avastin, Nexavar, or Sutent, the way Li does.

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey. If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key. “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained. READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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