Cancer cure
cancer, the universally-dreaded disease, could soon be eradicated. In a recent development, scientists tested two new drugs they claim can cure laboratory mice injected with the disease. And if all goes well, the first cancer patient could be injected with these drugs well within a year.
Some cancer experts say the drugs are the most exciting treatment scientists have ever developed. But they temper their zest with caution, pointing out that the history of cancer treatment is full of instances where great expectations have been followed by shattered hopes as many remarkable drugs, after producing successful results in animals, have fail to repeat the performance in humans.
However, the us National Cancer Institute has made the new drugs its top priority, according to its director Richard Klausner.He has even hailed the findings as the "single most exciting thing on the horizon" for the eradication of the disease. "I am putting nothing on higher priority than getting this into clinical trials," Klausner said. While the tests on laboratory mice were "remarkable and wonderful", he, nevertheless, wanted to emphasise the "ifs" that still remain.
The new protein-based drugs - angiostatin and endostatin - work by interfering with the blood supply. Administered together, the two drugs can make all types of cancers disappear without any side effects.
James Pluda, who is directing the cancer institute's planned tests of the drugs in patients, said scientists at the institute were "electrified" when they first heard about the drugs and its successful experiment from Judah Folkman, the drugs' discoverer. "People were almost overwhelmed. The data was simply remarkable," he said.
Cancer expert Jerome Groopman, however, sounds caution: "We are all driven by hope. But until the drugs are given to human patients, the crucial data simply do not exist."
So far, these drugs have been able to cure all tumours - even gigantic ones, equivalent to a 900-gramme growth - when tested on mice. The maximum that other drugs have been able to do is to slow down the growth of these tumours.
But even Folkman, a researcher at the Boston-based Children's Hospital, is cautious about the drugs' promise. It is dangerous to make predictions until it is tested on humans, he says. In a lighter vein he adds, "If you have cancer and you are a mouse, we can take good care of you."
Other scientists, however, are not so restrained. "Judah is going to cure cancer in another two years," says James Watson, a Nobel laureate. He says Folkman would be remembered along with scientists like Darwin as someone who permanently changed the fate of millions.
Folkman's attempts at cancer eradication began more than three decades ago, when he became obsessed by what many saw as a Quixotic question: that tumours cannot grows beyond a size of a pinhead if they do not have their own blood supply. If only he could block a tumour's blood supply, its lifeline, it would shrink to a minuscule size.
The first major break came about a decade ago when Folkman and his team found drugs that did exactly what he wanted. He called them anti-angiogenesis drugs as they inhibited the development of new blood vessels, thereby slowing down, though not entirely eradicating, tumours. Early results in patients indicated that these drugs may slow down human cancers, too.
Furthermore, these drugs had absolutely no side effects, at least on mice, something which the researchers found hard to believe. Even after administering the mice with four times more the dose needed to eliminate cancer, the researchers could not find any side effects, adverse or otherwise.These two proteins may be "exquisitely aimed, we do not know why, at cancer," says Folkman. For the last four years, all tumours had responded similarly to these drugs. Even leukaemia, a blood tumour, which needs to form new blood vessels in the bone marrow to grow responded, he says.
"But going from mice to people is a big jump indeed, with lots of failures," he warns, urging optimists not to make hasty predictions about the drugs' effects in humans. A history of failures has made the researchers wary of the four-lettered-word - cure.
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