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CANCER MIRACLES --
A veteran with cancer, given just months
to live, stages a miraculous recovery.
Doctors dismiss it as a
fluke. Yet the mystery may offer crucial
clues to fighting cancer.
Charles Burrows was given two
months to live in 2005. Then, with no treatment, his liver tumor
vanished. 'I won a lottery,' he says. (photo: Coral von Zumwalt
for Forbes) |
Story here...
http://www.forbes.com
/forbes/2009/0302/074_cancer_miracles.html
Story below:
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-------------------------
Cancer Miracles
A cancer patient, given just months to live,
stages a miraculous recovery. Doctors dismiss it as a fluke. Yet the
mystery may offer crucial clues to fighting cancer.
by Robert Langreth
Forbes Magazine
Charles Burrows noticed a strange lump on his
stomach in the summer of 2005. By November the pain was so bad it felt
like a knife was stabbing him in the stomach. A ct scan and a biopsy
confirmed Burrows' worst fears: He had inoperable liver cancer.
Few cancers have a worse prognosis. His tumor, the size of a baseball, was
already starting to strangle the portal vein going into the liver. Doctors
at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System told Burrows, then 56
years old, there was nothing they could do. "They said, 'Get your affairs
in order because you have 30 days to live, maybe 60,'" recalls Burrows,
who is divorced with three grown kids.
Burrows quit his carpentry job and spent the next two months in a fog.
Then things got very strange. In February 2006 Burrows developed abdominal
bloating, shaking, chills and nausea. Soon after that he noticed that the
lump on his stomach was gone. By then his daughter had found a doctor in
private practice willing to consider treating him. But the doctor couldn't
find a tumor. He went back to the VA, where gastroenterologist Nooman
Gilani was flabbergasted when computed tomography and magnetic resonance
imaging scans showed no sign of cancer. Where the tumor had once been,
there was "literally empty space," Gilani says.
Burrows remains free of cancer three years later and still seems dazed by
the turn of events. "I won a lottery, and I don't understand why," he
says. "I would like someone to explain to me what the heck happened."
Ole Nielsen Schou also looked like a goner. In 2002 the Danish
pharmaceutical production manager (now 69 and retired) found out that his
melanoma had spread to his liver, abdomen, lungs, bones and ten spots in
his brain. The abdominal tumor was surgically removed, but doctors at
Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen had no treatment for his other tumors. He
took a strange cocktail of 17 vitamins and supplements, including shark
cartilage pills, and imagined the metastases were rats and he was chasing
them with a club. In Depth: 6 Miracle Cancer Survivors.
Four months later he went back for a new scan and found that 90% of his
tumors had melted away. Soon they were gone. Co-workers hugged and kissed
him when they heard the news. Plastic surgeon Vennegaard Kalialis, who
detailed his case last year in Melanoma Research, doubts it was the
vitamins. "It is a complete mystery," she says. "Nobody has seen anything
like this."
Spontaneous tumor regressions are among the rarest and most mysterious
events in medicine, with only several hundred cases in the literature that
can be considered well documented. Regressions have most often been
reported in melanoma and in kidney cancer. But the phenomenon may, in
fact, be an everyday one, taking place beyond doctors' eyes. A recent
study suggests that as many as 1 in 3 breast tumors may vanish on their
own before being detected by a doctor.
Why do some patients get lucky? Scientists are finding tantalizing
evidence that the immune system, the body's defense against
disease-causing microbes, kicks in to play a critical role in combating
cancer. If that's the case, then Schou and Burrows are more than just
lucky patients. They are clues to how doctors may someday save thousands
of lives.
The evidence includes the fact that some unexplained remissions have
occurred after infections, which may propel the immune system into high
gear--possibly attacking the cancer tumor as well as the infection.
Burrows' remission seemed to begin after his strange illness. Schou's
abdominal tumor when removed was swarming with white blood cells, the lead
weapon in the body's immune system. It's also possible that ordinary
cancer survivors, people who beat the disease after getting radiation,
chemotherapy or surgery, get an assist from their own immune systems.
Big drug companies, including Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and
Sanofi-Aventis, are doggedly pursuing drugs that aim to boost the immune
system to fight cancer. GlaxoSmithkline is in final-stage tests of a
vaccine to prevent lung cancer from coming back after surgery. In an early
trial it slashed the probability of cancer recurrence by 27%. "It is all
about educating the patients' natural defenses against cancer," says
GlaxoSmithkline's Vincent Brichard. Easier said than done, of course. Some
patients, apparently, need only a small trigger to propel a massive
anticancer attack. With nearly all others, however, the cancer cells fight
back successfully and even co-opt immune cells to aid their growth. Why
some patients respond better than others to certain drugs is a focus of
furious scrutiny.
The role of the immune system in controlling cancer has been hotly debated
for decades--and indeed many scientists remain unconvinced. But Jedd D.
Wolchok, an oncologist at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center, thinks there is a connection. A spontaneous remission, he says, is
"either divine intervention or the immune system." While few researchers
directly study such cases--they are far too rare--they provide hints of
what the immune system might be able to do if we could harness it.
The immune system work is part of a new twist on the war on cancer. For
decades cancer researchers have focused mostly on killing cancer cells
with drugs and radiation, or removing them with surgery. But this is often
impossible to accomplish. So scientists are studying the environment
around tumors in order to invent drugs that will halt their spread. Such
drugs, like Genentech (nyse: DNA - news - people )'s Avastin, would be the
medical equivalent of cutting terrorist-cell supply lines or putting up
security checkpoints to stop them from getting into vital areas.
One of the first scientists to try to trigger the immune system to attack
cancer was the New York surgeon William Coley. He was inspired by a
patient with sarcoma who recovered after suffering an acute bacterial
infection. In the 1890s Coley started vaccinating other patients with
killed bacteria. He claimed that his toxins spurred the immune system to
destroy tumors in a minority of cases.
In the 1980s the natural immune protein interleukin-2 was touted as a
breakthrough. But it turned out to help only a small minority of cancer
patients and to sport an array of nasty side effects. Over the years
numerous trials of anticancer vaccines designed to train the immune system
to recognize cancer have shown mostly lackluster results. None of these
new therapeutic vaccines is approved in the U.S.
But intriguing data suggest that the immune system can combat cancer
sometimes. "To the body, a tumor looks like the biggest bacteria it has
ever seen," says Robert Schreiber, an immunologist at Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He has found that mice lacking
key components of their immune system are far more likely to develop
cancers. In one experiment 60% of mice missing something called the gamma
interferon receptor on their cells got tumors after being exposed to a
carcinogen, versus only 15% of normal mice.
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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