Word: cancers
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...like most Americans, either you or someone you know has probably been affected by cancer. And close to another million and a half more people will hear from their doctors for the first time this year that they have some form of the disease...
...thinking about those people as I sat in on sessions at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Atlanta, where cancer researchers and doctors from all over the world come to report on their latest studies. It has been five years since the drug Gleevec, introduced at this conference, electrified doctors, grabbed headlines and changed the way doctors think about treating cancer. Because Gleevec was exquisitely targeted to interrupt a specific step in the cancer cell's growth process, it heralded a new era of kinder, gentler treatments that would pack all the anti-cancer wallop...
...five years later, while these so-called targeted drugs have certainly changed cancer treatment, they have not had quite the impact that all the fanfare promised. People are still getting cancer, and still dying at almost the same rate as they were when surgery and chemotherapy were their only options. So what happened...
...turns out that Gleevec was a Cinderella story - a perfect matching of drug to cancer. The specific cancers for which Gleevec has wrought such miracles - chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) - rely pretty exclusively on a pathway that Gleevec targets, making these diseases ideal victims for a targeted therapy. But breast, lung, colon and prostate cancers, the leading types of cancer in the U.S., aren't as accommodating...
...doctors at ASCO were taking the next logical step: if one drug isn't enough to control these tumors, then maybe creating a cocktail of several drugs, and adding them to chemotherapy, will be. In some ways, it's a fallback strategy, says Dr. Leonard Saltz, a colon cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "Nobody set out to develop [these drugs] as an additive to chemotherapy," he says. "They were supposed to replace chemo, and make us look back and say, ?Can you believe that we had a barbaric age when we were treating patients with something that...