Hope for the future

There's an excellent article in today's NY Times which talks about Gleevec, the first of a new class of drugs to fight cancer. You may remember the splash Gleevec made a couple of years ago when it showed very promising results in halting and even reversing a rare type of colon cancer.

Mr. Weinstein is alive today and still taking the [Gleevec]....His treatment was based not on blasting cancer cells with harsh chemotherapy or radiation but instead on using a sort of molecular razor to cut them out.

That, Dr. Druker and others say, is the first fruit of a new understanding of cancer as a genetic disease.

Many of the next generation of cancer drugs will, like Gleevec, be based less on traditional profiling (ie, breast, ovarian or prostate cancer, etc) and more on the genetic mutations that cause cells to become malignant. Gleevec is something of a blueprint for these drugs to follow.

And although nothing like Gleevec is available for breast cancer patients today, drugs with similar mechanisms of action are in the research pipeline.

[Editor's note: that last link does work, but the site it is a part of appears to be down this morning.]