Word: mccormicks
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...Frank McCormick was flying home from a meeting on cancer genetics when a wild idea popped into his head. What if you could make a virus that would infect--and kill--cancer cells but leave healthy cells intact? The next day, McCormick excitedly explained his notion to colleagues at Onyx Pharmaceuticals in Richmond, Calif., a biotech company he had founded earlier that year. Some of them were as enthusiastic as he was. Others told him he was crazy; such a treatment couldn't possibly work...
...Frank McCormick was flying home from a meeting on cancer genetics when a wild idea popped into his head. What if you could make a virus that would infect-and kill-cancer cells but leave healthy cells intact? The next day, McCormick excitedly explained his notion to colleagues at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company he had founded earlier that year. Some of them were as enthusiastic as he was. Others told him he was crazy; such a treatment couldn’t possibly work...
Nine years later, McCormick, now the director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, has proof of his sanity in the form of Onyx-015, a virus that works exactly as he envisioned. Last year the company reported results of a clinical trial in which Onyx-015 injections, in combination with chemotherapy, melted away tumors in eight out of 30 patients with recurrent, late-stage head and neck cancer. In another study involving 27 patients whose cancers had metastasized to the liver (a condition that usually kills in six months), 11 were still alive nearly...
...McCormick’s story is one of hundreds of similar tales coming out of laboratories and cancer wards around the world, as treatments that were little more than half-baked ideas a decade ago now enter the final stages of testing. Of some 350 new compounds and molecules being tested on patients with cancer, more than half are based on innovative, sometimes even bizarre-sounding ways of homing in on tumors. Hundreds more are in earlier stages of development, putting clinicians and drug companies in the novel position of having more promising cancer treatments in the pipeline than they...
...fantastic person to know and to work with," McCormick said yesterday. "She is very smart, very devoted to the arts on a deep level and her commitment to undergraduates is always steadfast and has always been admirable...