Enlisting the Dying for Clues to Save Others

Dr. Roger Lo removing a tumor that he hopes will help researchers find drugs to treat relapsing cancer patients.

By AMY HARMON
NYT

LOS ANGELES — They had told him on his last visit: the experimental drug that had so miraculously melted his tumors was no longer working. His legs were swollen, the melanoma erupting in angry black lumps. The patient, a computer consultant in his 40s, had little time left.

And now the man’s doctor, Roger Lo of the cancer center at the University of California, Los Angeles, was calling to ask whether they could harvest a slice of one of his resurgent tumors for research he would almost certainly not be alive to benefit from. He would need to fly to Los Angeles from Northern California at his own expense, subject himself to an injection of anesthetic and the slight risk of infection, and spend yet another afternoon in the hospital.

“I was hoping,” Dr. Lo said that day last spring, “you would come in for a biopsy.”

The hope lies in a new breed of cancer drugs that work by blocking the particular genetic defect driving an individual tumor’s out-of-control growth — in the case of Dr. Lo’s patient, a single overactive protein. If researchers can pinpoint which new genetic alteration is driving the cancer when it evades the blockade — as it nearly always does — similarly tailored drugs may be able to hold it off for longer. The crucial evidence resides in the tumor cells of patients who, like Dr. Lo’s, have relapsed.

(More here.)