Word: tumorous
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...Researchers at Stanford University have harvested dendritic cells from advanced-cancer patients, exposed the cells to potent growth factors, added tumor-specific proteins to sensitize them and reintroduced the mixture into patients as a vaccine. Of 12 patients with advanced colorectal and lung cancer, two watched their tumors shrivel away, and another is still tumor free a year after receiving the vaccine...
...Folkman's insight was to look for substances that prevent tumors from building those pipelines. This approach worked beautifully in mice. Now more than 50 angiogenesis inhibitors are being studied in humans with a wide range of cancers; a dozen are in the final stages of testing. Thus far, only a tiny number of human patients treated with these compounds have seen their tumors shrink or disappear. Clinicians are nonetheless encouraged; while angiogenesis inhibitors don't make cancer go away, they do appear to slow tumor growth. And that means they may work best in conjunction with some...
...many scientists focus their attention on potential weaknesses in the cancer cell, others are concentrating on the flip side?recruiting the body's immune system to seek and destroy the renegade tissues. So far, this approach has proved less successful, largely because no matter how badly they are misbehaving, tumor cells are purely homegrown and thus presumed innocent by the immune system. When it finally catches on that something is wrong, it's usually too late...
...turns out, may be to put aside 99% of the immune system and focus on dendritic cells, a tiny but especially sensitive population of white blood cells that act as sentries to warn against invaders of all kinds. Scientists at California-based Cell Genesys, for example, have taken tumor cells from a number of cancers, genetically engineered them to pump out a hormone that stimulates production of a host of immune cells, and vaccinated late-stage lung-cancer patients with the mixture to boost chances that dendritic cells would sound the alarm against the tumors. In the latest study, three...
...Eventually, the goal is to detect precisely which molecular processes have gone wrong in an individual patient's cancer. Rather than being identified as lung cancer or breast cancer or kidney cancer, tumors will be tagged as EGFR positive, for example, or COX-2 positive. "The dream," says M.D. Anderson's Mendelsohn, "is that if Mrs. Smith gets a breast biopsy, we'll be able to say, 'Here are the four genes that are abnormal in her tumor,' pull open a drawer, pick out the antibodies or small molecules designed against the abnormal products of those genes, and give...