Word: breast
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...happened, Bradfield's tumor cells had a characteristic present in about 30% of breast-cancer cells: too many copies of a gene known as HER-2/neu. This gene makes a protein that helps relay the signal telling cells to divide. Having too much of it is associated with an especially rampaging, hard-to-treat cancer. Once this form of breast cancer metastasizes, a patient typically has just six to 12 months to live...
...living proof that this can work. A teacher turned homemaker in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., Bradfield is one of the lucky cancer patients who have already benefited from the new generation of gene-based treatments. She was 47 years old when she discovered a large lump in her breast. Tests showed that the malignancy had spread to her lymph nodes. Bradfield got the works: a double mastectomy and six months of chemotherapy, followed by radiation and then more chemo. It bought her 18 months of symptom-free life. Then one hot August night, she recalls, "I went...
...antibody is not a panacea. It didn't work as well for Bradfield's fellow guinea pigs in the initial study. But results of a just completed trial with 470 women do show it to be a significant improvement over chemo alone for women with this awful form of breast cancer. The details of the study will be revealed by Slamon this Sunday at a meeting in Los Angeles of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Manufactured by Genentech under the name Herceptin, the drug is on a fast track for approval by the FDA, perhaps before year...
...promise of these drugs holds up, however, cancer treatment in the 21st century will bear little resemblance to today's chemotherapy. Drugs will be precisely tailored to the individual tumor, and the cancers themselves will be described not by the site they attack--breast cancers, lung cancers, etc.--but by the genes they express. The National Cancer Institute is at work creating a DNA library of tumor types, a long-range project called C-GAP (Cancer Genome Anatomy Project). But it will be years before this library can be put to practical use. "It took 20 years to make testing...
...science beat to write about new gene-based treatments. "When I was a medical writer in the 1980s, cancer genes were just being discovered and understood. Now we are seeing that these discoveries may pay off for patients," says Wallis, who wrote our 1991 cover on breast cancer. "It's very exciting...