Entropy increases in kidney cancer treatment, but a bit of simplicity may emerge from chaos.

摘要

We know from the second law of thermodynamics that the spontaneous evolution of an isolated system can never lead to a decrease of its entropy (ie, its intrinsic disorder), as entropy always increases as long as the system evolves. Even though kidney cancer (the "system") cannot be regarded as a purely isolated system, and even though we are actively attempting to modify it with all our therapeutic weapons, it is clear that this system has evolved dramatically in the past few years and that complexity (if not entropy/disorder) is the direct consequence of this evolution. What has happened in the past 6 years in the field of kidney cancer is both exceptional and unprecedented. Starting in 2005, when the results of the sorafenib TARGET trial were first disclosed at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting, almost each subsequent year saw the presentation of one novel drug or more for this once-orphaned disease.