Let's Try to Cure Cancer

Indeed, the hoary phrase “a cure for cancer” now sounds bitterly ironic, since scientists discovered no such thing after President Nixon declared war on the disease in 1971. Metastatic melanoma, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and esophageal cancer are often death sentences, with the result that cancer will kill 569,490 people in the United States this year, projects the American Cancer Society. But there is a glimmer of hope in this bleak picture.

Some cancers are curable. Almost 90 percent of children with the most common form of pediatric leukemia will be cured; women whose estrogen-receptor-positive cancer responds to tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors will often be truly rid of their disease, as will women with HER2-positive breast cancer, which responds to herceptin. Other cancers are treatable, in the sense that although patients have to take drugs for the rest of their lives (as diabetics must take insulin forever), at least they’re alive and healthy. The best example of a treatable cancer is CML (chronic myelogenous leukemia), which can be held in check by Gleevec and related drugs. And now, says Bosl, cancer researchers are asking, “Can we use information about what makes some cancers curable to design treatments for the others?” The answer is an emphatic yes, says his Sloan-Kettering colleague Charles Sawyers, whose research was instrumental in developing Gleevec: “I feel like I’ve seen the future.”