Word: stromal
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...Gleevec reversed the odds for patients suffering from two rare cancers - chronic myelogenous leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors - for which there had been no effective treatments. In a matter of months, patients who were out of options had their lives back, and while their cancer was not cured, it was under control, at least for a while. Other new drugs, including Tarceva and Iressa, also halt tumor growth by messing with tyrosine kinase. The key to developing such drugs, says Glaspy, is "torturing cancer cells, and getting them to confess to us which pathways they are dependent...
...turns out that Gleevec was a Cinderella story - a perfect matching of drug to cancer. The specific cancers for which Gleevec has wrought such miracles - chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) - rely pretty exclusively on a pathway that Gleevec targets, making these diseases ideal victims for a targeted therapy. But breast, lung, colon and prostate cancers, the leading types of cancer in the U.S., aren't as accommodating...
Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the U.S. and the Helsinki and Turku Universities in Finland are already trying Glivec on a rare abdominal cancer called GIST (for gastrointestinal stromal tumor). More common malignancies, such as cancers of the breast and colon, arise as a result of several genetic accidents and so are unlikely to respond to Glivec. But at the very least, the drug's preliminary successes have given cancer researchers promising avenues to pursue. And sometimes that...
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