Word: tumor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Virtually alone in the scientific community, Folkman decided it would be easier to try to kill a tumor by destroying its blood supply than by attacking it directly. His reasoning was sound. Tumors are made up of rapidly dividing mutant cells that adapt quickly to almost any treatment thrown at them. Blood vessels, by contrast, are made up of normal cells that grow much more slowly and are nowhere near as difficult to outwit. Hoping to starve tumors through their supply line of nutrients, Folkman set out to find a drug that could block the construction of new blood vessels...
...looked--from cartilage to fungi to the notorious sedative thalidomide--Folkman found one compound after another that exhibited anti-angiogenic properties. But none of them was as effective as he wanted it to be. Then he remembered something that surgeons had often observed: that taking out one big tumor from a patient seems to trigger the growth of lots of smaller ones. Could it be that tumors secrete a substance that inhibits the growth of rival tumors' blood vessels...
...take on the project. Together he and Folkman eventually determined that various segments of a naturally occurring protein called plasminogen seemed to do the trick. They called the collection of molecular fragments angiostatin and found that each version of the compound differed slightly in its ability to stop a tumor from growing...
...matter what its configuration, angiostatin could not make a mouse tumor disappear. Not, that is, until Folkman and O'Reilly added to the mix a second molecular fragment, which they called endostatin, from yet another naturally occurring protein. Together, the two compounds destroyed a range of tumors in mice. The results were startling enough that they merited testing in people--which is exactly what Pluda, at the National Cancer Institute, intends to do. How fast those studies can begin depends on how much angiostatin and endostatin EntreMed and its business partner, Bristol-Myers Squibb, can produce and whether they...
...Folkman's techniques. They prefer a more targeted approach: selectively attacking the various molecules and biochemical signals involved in building a new blood vessel. For instance, researchers at Ixsys, a biotech company in San Diego, have developed an artificial antibody that dissolves the biochemical glue that holds a tumor's capillaries together. Indeed, one of the patients in their safety study exceeded all expectations when two of the tumors in his abdomen shrank 70%. "I've been on the drug now for over a year," says Barry Riccio, a college professor from Illinois who is suffering from a rare sarcoma...