Cancer is such that any attempt to glean an insight into its treatment is often visited by tragedy.
However a step ahead.
But isn’t the price great?
Yet these tragedies can not be avoided.
Let’s Pray that the price paid is compensated by the Greatest Good.
Story:
In 2005, after she had spent more than a year going from specialist to specialist, a dermatologist figured it out. Mrs. McDaniel, then 62, had Sezary syndrome, a rare T cell lymphoma, in which white blood cells become cancerous and migrate to the skin. All her doctors could tell her was that the disease was incurable, that there was no standard treatment, and that on average patients at her stage die within a few years.
“Of course I was shocked,” Mrs. McDaniel said in an interview last September.
She wept that day as her husband drove her home. And she asked God to help her cope.
Before cancer, she had had a vibrant life, hiking in the mountains, traveling the world, entertaining her wide network of friends. Her disease destroyed all of that. She could not even enjoy her luxuriant garden because sun on her inflamed skin was agony.
Although there is no standard treatment, for five years chemotherapy held her disease at bay. But in the summer of 2010, she got worse, much worse, with hundreds of tumorspopping up under her skin. Some grew as large as kiwi fruits and split open.
Her son, Dr. McDaniel, decided he would orchestrate the use of the most advanced techniques of gene sequencing and analysis to take on her cancer. Because of his job — he works for Illumina, a company that does DNA sequencing — Dr. McDaniel had read scientific reports and gone to medical conferences where he heard talks on whole genome sequencing. He noticed that the patients all seemed to have rare cancers.
“Every time I heard one of those stories, I thought, ‘That’s my mom,’ ” he said.
For now, there are not many drugs that can target specific gene mutations in cancer cells.
But the hope is that when more is known and more drugs are developed, doctors will treat cancer by blocking several major genes at once. With several escape routes barred, the cancer will not be able to break free of the drugs stopping its growth.
……..
He worked all night, found a paper by scientists who had deliberately fused those very genes and discovered that, yes, the genetically altered T cells had their growth signals reversed.
At 5:45 a.m. Dr. McDaniel sent an e-mail to his collaborators.
“I was so tired at that point that, believe it or not, I had forgotten about the drug,” he said.
He fell asleep and woke at 11 a.m., rushing back to his computer. The melanoma drug he had forgotten in his exhaustion should hit that target. And that could stop his mother’s cancer from growing. “My jaw was just hanging open,” Dr. McDaniel said. “The implications were so tantalizing that I didn’t dare believe them.”
A Remarkable Turnaround
Mrs. McDaniel had her first infusion on July 28, and the result seemed remarkable. Her oncologist, Dr. Gohmann, was overwhelmed. Her son, who had been terrified that he and the doctors might have made a terrible mistake, was overjoyed.
Mrs. McDaniel, who had not left her house for several months except to see her doctors, began going to movies and restaurants every day.
On Sept. 2, she and her husband went to the Heirloom Restaurant, in the middle of horse country, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
She had given away so many of her clothes when she thought she was dying that she puzzled over what to wear. She had a favorite blouse that was loosefitting and comfortable, but Mr. McDaniel recalled, “It was long gone.” She could not drink wine with the medicines she was taking, so she and her husband sipped iced tea in the quiet dining room.
“We reminisced, but also talked about the future as we hoped it would be,” Mr. McDaniel said.
But the reprieve lasted only weeks. By the end of September, the cancer was back.
Dr. McDaniel did not want to give up. Mrs. McDaniel’s tumor was sequenced again, looking for a new mutation, but there was nothing striking. As Dr. McDaniel sifted through the data, he called his parents every day. They began calling him the governor, hoping he would bring his mother another stay of execution.
The doctors considered a less appealing target, a mutated gene that T cells use to stop growing. Unpublished studies in mice suggested that a kidney cancer drug might stop the growth of T cells with this mutation.
By then, Mrs. McDaniel’s body was ravaged by the cancer and her treatments. She had entered hospice care, with a hospital bed in her home and a nurse and an assistant to help.
“We had this shaky evidence, based on the genome and on unpublished data,” Dr. McDaniel said.
But the drug’s side effects were mild, and her family and doctors decided she should try it.
“If we do nothing, she will be dead in one to six weeks,” Dr. McDaniel explained.
Mrs. McDaniel took the drug on Nov. 26. But she was so ill that she was unable to get out of bed, unable to drink from a straw. Her son Tim took his children to her bedroom one at a time so they could say goodbye.
“She wasn’t talking, but her eyes were open, and she acknowledged each one with a weak chuckle,” Dr. McDaniel said.
Three days later, she briefly rallied. Her husband held her hand.
“She said, ‘I love you,’ ” Mr. McDaniel said. “She then repeated it twice more. I kissed her forehead and told her that I loved her. Those were our last words to each other.”
The next morning, Nov. 30, Mr. McDaniel woke early and went to his wife’s room. Her breathing had become erratic. Worried, he stepped out and asked the hospice nurse to call the doctor. “In the seconds that I was absent, she died,” Mr. McDaniel said.
The team that tried to save her was heartbroken too, and was left with a long list of what-ifs. “If you really look at it, what did we buy her?” Dr. de Castro asked. Mrs. McDaniel was dying last January. Yet would she have survived as long even without the sequencing or the drugs? Did the team make a difference?
“I hope we did,” Dr. de Castro said, “but it’s hard to know.”.
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