Interview: Fighting Cancer With Smart Bombs

The drug itself represents about 20 years of trial and error?how do you get the chemotherapy bound to the antibody? It's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You can't have it bound too tightly, you can't have it bound too loosely, you have to have it bound just right so the chemotherapy is released just where you want it to be. It wasn't until 2006 that the linker component was fully realized.

Mark Sliwkowski, a research scientist at the drug company, Genentech, [that] markets T-DM1, played an instrumental role not only in the development of T-DM1 but also . . . in the original development of trastuzumab and pertuzumab. Mark's the common thread from a scientist standpoint, with major contributions to these three drugs over two decades. I tell my two children, "This man's been working on this longer than you've been on the planet," and they're 8 and 10.

It does take a long time from the discovery in the lab. In 1989, we knew that in one out of five breast cancers, HER-2 was the driving force behind the cancer's growth; two and a half decades later, we're just realizing how to take advantage of that. If we continue at this pace, even with the technology breakthroughs we have, that means within my entire career there will maybe be one more breakthrough in the way we treat breast cancer. It seems like we should set the bar a little higher. The pace is too slow.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/breakthroughs/interview-fighting-cancer-with-smart-bombs-15553244?src=rss

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