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(May 10, 1998 07:14 a.m. EDT http://www.nando.net) -- Cancer is among the world's most frightening and deadly illnesses. It kills indiscriminately and often plays a cruel game with its victims, sliding into remission and raising hopes, only to return unexpectedly for its fatal finality.
In most cases, chemotherapy and other treatments can buy the patient time, but it often comes at a high price -- a long and painful course of treatment that sometimes leaves the body more ravaged than the disease itself does. Miracles are in short supply, and research continues to offer the best hope that we will eventually beat this killer, if not in one great scientific breakthrough, at least by tediously unraveling its mysteries piece by piece, mouse by mouse.
The news that scientists may have developed a safe and effective cure for cancer in mice gives us reason to hope that just maybe this could be the breakthrough the world has been waiting for, is desperate for. But the scientific community is skeptical, and the public should be, too. This would not be the first time medical science has raised expectations, only to leave crushing disappointment behind when a promising cancer treatment in animals turned out to have little or no impact on humans.
The treatment causing all the excitement is the product of controversial research by Dr. Judah Folkman, a Boston physician who believes that cutting off the blood flow to cancerous tumors kills them. Folkman's theory has long been considered out of the mainstream, and his rejection of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and other traditional cancer treatments has made him the target of ridicule. Until now, the drugs he has developed have had only limited success when tested in humans.
That could change with his latest experiment. One of Folkman's associates, Dr. Michael O'Reilly, has found two proteins that are at last showing amazing results, especially when used in combination. In clinical tests on mice, the proteins -- angiostatin and endostatin -- attacked a broad range of tumors, shrinking many until they disappeared. The treatment produced no harmful side effects, even when the mice were given tremendous amounts of the substances. Could it be that when the cure for cancer is found, it will come without side effects?
We may now have a cure for cancer in mice, but humans, including cancer patients frantically calling their doctors about this latest development, will have to wait and hope. Medications that work wonders on animals frequently fail to produce similar results in the far more complex human body.
But in the battle against cancer, we must keep hope alive, no matter how many times it is followed by disappointment. If not this time, maybe the next.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.
