Word: neuroblastoma
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Nineteen-year-old Michael Gillick was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at the age of 3 1/2 months. His cancer--which has spread to his face, bones and heart, filling much of his body cavity--could kill him at any time. Michael is just one of more than 100 children with cancer in or near the small town of Toms River, N.J. (pop. 7,524). It's the kind of disproportionate grouping that epidemiologists call a "cancer cluster." Residents put the blame on local companies that allegedly discharged cancer-causing chemicals into the water supply. Determined to get the situation investigated...
...grow much more rapidly than deep-seated human tumors. Also, as Nobel laureate J. Michael Bishop observes, too much breeding isn't always a good thing. In his labs at the University of California, San Francisco, he is genetically altering mice to provide better models for studying leukemia and neuroblastoma, the most common tumor in children under 3. But genetic alterations can go only so far. "How similar the mouse is to man," he concedes, "is still a legitimate issue...
Wick said that the first step is to identify a chemical trait unique to the cancerous cells such as the presence of L-dopa. Both melanoma and neuroblastoma are jet-black tumors due to the pigment-producing abilities of their host cells, he said...
...dopa is the starting material for the synthesis of melanin, a pigment commonly found in skin cells affected by melanoma, a form of skin cancer. In the brain cells affected by neuroblastoma, another form of cancer, L-dopa serves as a starting material for the manufacture of norepinephrine, a chemical signal in the nervous system...
...Phenomenon. Since 1900 there have been only 120 proven cases of such spontaneous regression. Leading regressive cancers: neuroblastoma, a malignancy of the sympathetic nervous system that turns up chiefly in young children, and chorionepithelioma, a very rare malignancy of the placenta in pregnant women. Regression has been recorded only once in carcinoma of the liver, once in carcinoma of the pancreas...
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