Word: tumorous
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This welcome boom in cancer drugs owes its beginnings to one of this century's greatest scientific insights: that cancer is caused not by depression or miasmas or sexual repression, as people at various times have believed, but by faulty genes. Every tumor begins with just one errant cell that has been unlucky enough to suffer at least two, but sometimes several, genetic mutations. Those mutations prod the cell into replicating wildly, allowing it to escape the control that genes normally maintain over the growth of new tissue...
That's because a tumor is made up of a hodgepodge of cells containing different genetic mutations, each of which allows it to wreak a different brand of havoc. Some mutations spur rapid growth; others prod nearby blood vessels into sprouting new capillaries; still others send cancer cells out into the bloodstream, where they can seed new tumors. Within 10 years, predicts Robert Weinberg, a cancer biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., "we will analyze the mutant genes and then tailor-make a treatment [for] that particular tumor...
PROSTATE PROMISE The study is tiny--only 11 men participated--but the results are tantalizing. Using an experimental genetically engineered vaccine, doctors have been able to trick the body into attacking prostate cancer. The vaccine consists of a patient's own cancer cells culled from the surgically removed tumor. When injected, the body recognizes the cells in the vaccine--as well as any lingering cells from the tumor--as foreign invaders and launches an all-out immune-system attack. Promising, yes. But whether further tests pan out is yet to be seen...
...young adults--a woman, 20, and a man, 23--who suffered early injuries to the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain thought to serve as a kind of moral and social compass. The woman was run over by a car at 15 months; the man had a brain tumor removed at three months. Both made remarkable recoveries until they began to display serious behavioral problems...
Unlike other cancers, lung cancer is extremely hard to detect in its earliest, most treatable stages. Even so, about 20% of lung-cancer patients are found to have a tumor whose biological characteristics and small size give them a good chance of being cured if the malignant growth is surgically removed...