Remember that Cure for Cancer You Promised Us?!?
It isn't often that the cure for cancer comes along, but in 1998 the New York Times ran a front page article describing what was hoped would be such a drug. The new drug, endostatin, had proven to be almost miraculously successful in curing cancer in mice. Mice that had advanced stages of metastatic cancer including huge tumors (the equivalent of a 2 pound tumor in a human) were completely cured by the drug. The drug worked on a very wide variety of cancers and didn't have any of the nasty side effects of traditional treatments like chemotherapy. Nor did there seem to be any of the problems of resistance normally found with chemotherapy. The mechanism of action of the drug was novel: it worked by preventing the formation of blood vessels in tumors, without which the tumors couldn't survive.
Those of you who remember reading the original article may recall the tremendous excitement that it captured. Many researchers in the field were predicting the imminent cure of cancer. James Watson (yes, that James Watson, the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA and Nobel Laureate) was quoted (see the Times' follow-up) as saying that Folkman, the discoverer of the drug, would "cure cancer within two years" and would be "remembered along with scientists like Charles Darwin as someone who permanently altered civilization". To be fair, others like Folkman himself were much more reticent in their predictions. Still, it was hard after reading the article not to think cancer was claiming it's last victims.
So why 9 years after the article and 7 years after cancer was supposedly going to be cured are we still losing our friends and family members to this horrible disease? And what ever happened to endostatin? As usual, we here at It's Still News are here to answer the questions that the mainstream has largely forgotten about.
As described here the company that began manufacturing endostatin, EntreMed, saw its stock prices soar in 1998, around the time of the original New York Times article. Of course, in the world of medicine things are always more difficult than they seem, as described in this 2002 follow-up interview with Dr. Folkman. In the two years after that interview, things only got worse. The clinical trials did not go nearly as well as hoped. The drug made it into Stage II trials with 193 patients but had mixed results. For example, 38 of 42 people taking the drug for neuroendocrine-tumors stopped taking the drug because the drug wasn't working. Additionally, there were difficulties in producing the drug and the production method was proving to be very expensive. In 2004, clinical trials were stopped and EntreMed gave the rights to endostatin back to Children's Hospital.
Interestingly, though, the drug has not been completely abandoned. A Chinese researcher and entrepreneur found a modification of the original drug that retained its useful properties without being so expensive to produce. This drug was approved in China at the end of 2005. The status of bringing this drug to the US is unclear, and some US researchers are a little skeptical of some of the results. (As a hysterical look into the need the Chinese seem to feel to prove themselves, I love the quote from this ten-line chinese article: "the successful development of Endostar signifies that China has become a medically advanced country in developing anti-tumor medicine".)
In the meantime a different drug based on the same principle of limiting the blood supply to tumors, Avastin, has been approved by the FDA. But it seems a far cry from the miraculous cure-all that endostatin seemed to be in mice. Whether any such 'miracle' drug will ever come is unknown, but in the meantime we've probably all learned to temper our expectations a bit.