Word: tumor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Dr. Mark Malkin is working with a substance that targets a receptor for another growth factor called PDGF (platelet-derived growth factor). This receptor studs the surfaces of cells in certain ovarian, prostate, lung and brain tumors. Malkin has been testing the drug, SU101, on patients with an extraordinarily deadly brain tumor called glioblastoma. Median survival for a patient found to have this cancer is 14 months...
...drug, manufactured by Sugen, appears to slow or arrest tumor growth in about a third of glioblastoma patients, but it's too soon to say how long the benefits will last. Side effects appear to be mild. "We have one patient who's been on it for two years and three months," says Malkin. "His tumor is still there, but it's stable. He's alive; he's at work. For someone with recurrent glioblastoma, that's remarkable...
...promise of these drugs holds up, however, cancer treatment in the 21st century will bear little resemblance to today's chemotherapy. Drugs will be precisely tailored to the individual tumor, and the cancers themselves will be described not by the site they attack--breast cancers, lung cancers, etc.--but by the genes they express. The National Cancer Institute is at work creating a DNA library of tumor types, a long-range project called C-GAP (Cancer Genome Anatomy Project). But it will be years before this library can be put to practical use. "It took 20 years to make testing...
...That's not entirely self-effacing whimsy. Like every good researcher--and every responsible science journalist--he knows all too well that most drugs that work in lab animals turn out to be duds in humans. The field is littered with "magic bullets" that failed, among them monoclonal antibodies, tumor necrosis factor, interferon and interleukin-2. While all were initially hyped as potential cure-alls, they have turned out to have only modest usefulness in the war on cancer. At best, says Dr. Allen Oliff, Merck & Co.'s chief of cancer research, no more than 10% or 20% of agents...
Trouble is, Black 6 and kin often do their jobs too well. "Mice distort or exaggerate what you see in humans," says tumor biologist Robert Kerbel of Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Science Centre. Mouse tumors, which are usually planted just under the skin, 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...