Word: cancerous
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...with Silicon Valley than Big Pharma to support research that in four years got four new treatments to patients--Thalomid, Velcade, Revlimid and Doxil. That's about six years faster than the decade it usually takes for such drug development and rollout. Multiple myeloma is a rare cancer of the bone marrow that sickens about 20,000 Americans each year--precisely the uncommon form of the disease that often falls into the research cracks. The MMRF benefited from the aggressive work of founder Kathy Giusti, a multiple-myeloma survivor and former pharmaceutical executive. When she and her group first raised...
...MMRF made sure it got the most from its grant dollars by adopting an enforced-collaboration model in 2004, linking work at four cancer centers into a consortium managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and providing them all with patients, tissue samples and a set of targets and goals. "The odds of a cure coming from one center are nil," Giusti says. "You need a mutual fund to fight cancer." From not having a single drug in the pipeline, the MMRF now has 30, half of them in clinical trials. The average lifespan of a multiple-myeloma patient has been extended by three...
...MMRF model works for a single, specialized cancer, it's not clear that a group like Stand Up to Cancer--which is casting a far wider research net--will show the same results. But clinicians say it's worth trying. "There needs to be a mechanism whereby we can bring groups of people together from different institutions in one group," says DuBois, who is part of SU2C's scientific panel. At the same time, there is hope that the 20% of grants SU2C is setting aside for outside-the-box research will yield something semimiraculous...
...more communication among scientists is always better than less, and besides, there may be more engineering to beating cancer than people realize. MIT, which knows a thing or two about designing things, is building a $100 million research center that will put together biologists and chemists with engineers skilled in such arts as nanofabrication. "We are going to breed a group of people who are totally aware of the cancer problem and totally aware of the modern tools and computational powers of engineers," says Sharp...
...plans to make dream-team proposals, which Sharp views as a chance to loose the forces of science on the particularly diabolical forms of cancer. One of MIT's strategies is to build nanomolecules that, when injected into the body, can hunt for cancer cells, bind to them and deliver therapies directly to the bad cells; or to build nanomolecules that could locate abnormal genes and silence them. "It's MIT," says Sharp. "We shake and bake...