Word: braine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Navigating methodically, Black now divides the tumor from the normal brain, cauterizing severed blood vessels as he goes. He cuts all the way around the edge of the tumor, gradually detaching its mass. Fifteen minutes later, he lifts the bulk of Schuler's cancer out of the hole he has made and places it in a stainless-steel bowl. "Call the tumor guys to come down and get a specimen," he orders. Another piece of the tumor will be sent to Black's own lab while he goes back in to clean up the cavity...
...hope is a rare commodity when it comes to brain cancer. Although successful treatment of tumors like Schuler's malignant astrocytoma can give patients three to five years more, the mean survival period for people with the most common and deadly brain cancers (glioblastomas) is about five months without surgery--and about a year and a half even after successful operations, according to one study. Like Black, neurosurgeons at top cancer centers around the country are working on a variety of experimental techniques that they hope will improve patients' survival. Any one of them may turn...
...task. Says Dr. Edward Oldfield, chief of surgical neurology at the National Institutes of Health: "This is the unique feature of his career--the way he is using rather striking advances in basic science in the application of new treatments." Keith Black is fighting an all-fronts war against brain cancer...
Black is best known for his discovery that bradykinin, a natural body peptide, is highly effective in opening the blood-brain barrier by making capillary walls leaky--the way leukotrienes do, he says, only to a greater degree. "The fantastic thing about bradykinin," says Black, "is that it does not open the barrier to the normal brain--only to tumors." By using RMP-7, a synthetic version of bradykinin, Black's team has been able to focus chemotherapy drugs right on the tumors, increasing the effective dose as much as 10-fold. Crucial to RMP-7's success, however...
Black is also working on an entirely different experiment for treating tumors. Cooperating with molecular biologist Habib Fakhrai, he is trying to enlist the patient's own immune system to attack brain cancers. Tumor cells produce a substance called TGF-beta (transforming growth factor-beta) that both fuels their own growth and tricks the immune system into ignoring their presence. Using genetic engineering, Fakhrai has come up with a genetic "switch," called TGF-beta antisense. When inserted into a tumor cell's genetic machinery, the antisense turns off the cell's ability to produce TGF-beta. Injected into patients, these...