Word: patients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doctors would even have tried to remove the malignant growth, located in her right frontal lobe, that had already taken over one-sixth of her cranium, pushing her brain down and to the left. Leave it alone, and the cancer would keep compressing useful tissue inexorably, robbing the patient of speech, movement, consciousness, life itself--all within months. Try to cut it out, and there would be the risk of taking too little, leaving cancerous tissue to grow again, or taking too much, causing profound and irreparable brain damage...
Schuler's death sentence has been postponed, perhaps for years. By the following day, she will be walking the halls. Not surprisingly, she will feel deep gratitude. This is not uncommon; most of Black's patients exhibit an awe for his skills that borders on worship. "You're God," exclaims another patient on being told his tumor has been removed. "No, I'm not," Black replies, quietly but firmly. He gets such comments frequently, and they make him very uncomfortable. No one is more acutely aware than Black of the perils of the physician-God complex...
Black is also working on an entirely different experiment for treating tumors. Cooperating with molecular biologist Habib Fakhrai, he is trying to enlist the patient's own immune system to attack brain cancers. Tumor cells produce a substance called TGF-beta (transforming growth factor-beta) that both fuels their own growth and tricks the immune system into ignoring their presence. Using genetic engineering, Fakhrai has come up with a genetic "switch," called TGF-beta antisense. When inserted into a tumor cell's genetic machinery, the antisense turns off the cell's ability to produce TGF-beta. Injected into patients, these...
Black now wants to turbocharge TGF-beta gene therapy with dendritic cells, white blood cells that identify foreign proteins for destruction. He proposes to harvest dendritic cells from a patient's blood, expose them to cancer proteins in a test tube and reinject them. The cells would then point out the now familiar proteins to the immune system's killer T cells, which would track them down like bloodhounds that have been exposed to an escaped convict's dirty laundry. "We can completely eradicate glioblastomas in rats using this strategy," says Black. "We want to get these treatments out into...
...images, the MedArray computer maps out the cancer, then directs the antennas to cook it like a rump roast. Because the entire process is controlled by computers, it is conceivable that the surgeon will not have to be at the scene of an operation. Just imagine, says Black, "the patient is lying in the MedArray machine in Nairobi. The MRI image is sent to a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, who directs the machine to destroy the tumor while he's getting feedback via the Internet. And then the patient walks...