Word: tumors
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...beyond the hype and confusion, something very real is going on. These are exciting times in cancer research, perhaps the most exciting since Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971. Angiogenesis inhibition, the tumor-starving process that Folkman pioneered, is indeed a promising line of research. Dozens of labs are racing to perfect it, some of them doing work that is more advanced than Folkman's. But it's not the only field with potential. Just as exciting, say many researchers, is the revolution in cancer treatments made possible by what they've learned about how genes and cancer...
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...