A New Treatment’s Tantalizing Promise Brings Heartbreaking Ups and Downs
[Part Two of “Genetic Gamble: New Approaches to Fighting Cancer.”] Genetic sequencing has led to promising new treatments for cancer, but we still have a ways to go:
“Scientists had compared the entire genetic sequences of the tumor cells invading her body with those in her healthy cells, searching for mutated tumor genes that could be thwarted by drugs approved for other cancers or even other diseases. That had led them to give her an expensive drug approved just a month earlier for melanoma patients. It had never been given to anyone with a blood cell cancer like hers. In theory, the drug should have killed her. Instead, it seemed to have halted or even reversed her cancer.
“But would it last? And what would it mean if it did not?”
Author:
Source:
The New York Times
Published: Jul 8, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,590 words)