Word: folkman
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...Assistant Professor of Pathology Donald Ingber and Professor of Anatomy and Cellular Biology M. Judah Folkman, the theoretical part of the research resolves a longstanding clinical question in the study of tumors: rather than being "born" with the capacity to cripple their host, bodily tumors acquire that ability sometime in the early stage of their development...
...Folkman likens this tumor expansion process to the construction of an apartment complex on the spot where a lone house once stood. The plumbing and electricity--meaning the cell's blood--must be improved dramatically, since the apartment's residents cannot survive on the much fewer resources of the old house...
...That's very dangerous," Folkman says. "That's when the tumor can grow exponentially." Even more importantly, he says, the newly-recruited blood vessels allow the tumor to send out offshoots known as metastases, which travel through the circulatory system until they lodge in vital organs such as lymph nodes, the lungs, brain or sexual organs...
Ingber, along with Folkman and their associates, sent the corrupted sample to Japan, where chemists grew the fungus in huge 10,000-liter vats in order to extract the potent compound. The Japanese found the active, capillary-suppressing agent to be the rare fungus fumagillin...
...Folkman, for whom tumor repression would be a scientific coup of Nobel proportions, is likewise taking a long-term perspective. As for clinical usage of the drug, he says, "it's our goal, but it's not in sight...