Word: marrow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kennedy and Moakley are longtime proponents of organ donation legislation. They were founders of the bi-partisan Congressional Task Force on Organ and Tissue Donation and championed the Organ Donor Card Insert Act and the Organ and Bone Marrow Transplant Program...
Useful as they are, these drugs share the same serious drawback. Because they target all dividing cells, they also kill off normal tissue in the skin, hair and bone marrow. The next generation of anticancer agents, however, promises to be much more selective. By targeting oncogenes, for example, researchers hope to switch off the signals that prompt cancer cells to divide in the first place. Particularly promising is a class of drugs known as farnesyltransferase inhibitors, which have been shown to shrink tumors while sparing normal tissues. "Oncology is not a profession that inspires optimism," admits Dr. Allen Oliff, director...
Starzl acknowledges that this insight had also occurred to other researchers. Scientists, going back as far as 1960 Nobel prizewinner Peter Medawar, had come to recognize that tolerance was possible. If bone marrow, for instance, would only accept an interloping cell, the larger system would follow suit. The trouble was, the only way to achieve that was to kill off the body's entire current bone-marrow supply and replace it with another--a technique oncologists use as a last-ditch weapon to try to cleanse patients of such systemic cancers as leukemia and breast cancer...
...bone-marrow work and solid-organ transplant work have traditionally been two separate fields of medicine. "The big misconception," says Starzl, "was not realizing that the acceptance and tolerance of solid-organ grafts are due to the same mechanisms described by Medawar. There is a seamless work of transplantation immunology. It's so damn simple, it's crushing...
...assimilation studies by James Gozzo, dean of the Bouve College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Boston's Northeastern University, as well as by other researchers, including Judith Thomas, director of the Transplant Center at the University of Alabama. They have found that by first transplanting some donor bone marrow into the recipient animal, it is possible to trick the animal's immune system into accepting a solid-organ transplant almost as if it were native to its own body--just as Starzl suggests will be the case in humans. That in turn allows them to use lower doses...