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A quarter-century of investment is starting to pay off as scientists and researchers, armed with new genetic and molecular strategies, for the first time blieve that victory is within reach in the war on the most deadly cancers By Dan Gordon |
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people don't even like to use the word. To many, cancer is still the
"Big C," an incurable disease that, perhaps, can be put
off thorugh treatment, but ultimately often ends all too predictably:
death. Talk of cures strikes most either as selv-serving hype or Pollyanna-ish
optimism.
Ironically, the truth is that to those in-the-know -- the scientists and clinical researchers who spend each day battling this fearsome foe -- cancer's transition from fatal illness to a treatable disease along the lines of, say diabetes or hypertension is no longer far-fetched; it's not even that far away. For years, the main stays of cancer treatment have been surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Though the traidtional trio has saved many lives, particularly in the increasing number of cases in which cancer is detected at an early, localized stage, it frequently is not enough. Surgery is insufficient when tumor cells have escaped to other parts of the body; ratiation and chemotherapy are both crude and harsh strategies, limited by their inability to discriminate between normal and malignant cells. But the revolution in molecular biology and genetics, scientists are now taking the fight against cancer to an entirely new level -- a highly sophisticated strategy involving the very building blocks of human life. The blueprint was created back in 1953, when Watson and Crick defined the double-helix structure of DNA. Genes could be coloned, sequenced and manipulated in order to understand how their encoded instructions behanve in health and disease. |
In the early half-century since, scientists have gained an immense understanding of the genetic events that lead to many cancers, enabling researchers to begin to design more rational treatment strategies and drugs to hit cancer at its very source. UCLA has become the locus of such research based on the groundbreaking work of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center's Dr. Dennis Slamon and his group. Their basic research has led to the development and successful testing of the drug Herceptin, the first of the new generation of genetic based drugs that target a specific mutation and is now being marketed to fight cancer. It has not come easily -- or chaply. UCLA researchers have invested a quarter-century of time, money and frustration in the laboratory trying to stop the seemingly inexorable march of what has, in truth, too often been a death sentence. But finally the work is paying off. For the first time, even the most skeptical of scientists will confess that, at last, they have the troops, the money, the technology and the will to win the 20th century's most deadly war. |
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