Via Outside the Beltway, comes this report about recent advances in using genetics to unwrap the mysteries of cancer.
Jay Weinstein found out he had chronic myelogenous leukemia in 1996, two weeks before his marriage.
He was 36 years old, a New York City firefighter, and he thought his health was great.
He learned there was little hope for a cure. The one treatment that could save him was a bone marrow transplant, but that required a donor, and he did not have one. By 1999, his disease was nearing its final, fatal phase. He might have just weeks to live.
Then, Weinstein had a stroke of luck. He managed to become one of the last patients to enroll in a preliminary study at the Oregon Health & Science University, testing an experimental drug.
Weinstein is alive today and is still taking the drug, now on the market as Gleevec. Its maker, Novartis, supplies it to him free because he participated in the clinical trial.
Dr. Brian Druker, a Howard Hughes investigator at the university’s Cancer Institute, who led the Gleevec study, sees Weinstein as a pioneer in a new frontier of science. His treatment was based not on blasting cancer cells with harsh chemotherapy or radiation but instead on using a sort of molecular razor to cut them out.
Traditional apporaches to fighting cancer usually involve bombarding the body with poisonous chemicals or deadly radiation in the hope that they will kill the cancer cells more effectively than they would kill the patient’s body. While successful in many ways, this approach also has more than a few unfortunate side effects. The idea of being able to attack cancer at its genetic roots is appealing and, hopefully, will work.
