Cooper lost no time from work, and Gleevec kept his cancer’s runaway white blood cells in check for more than two years. When he developed resistance to it, he switched to a second-generation drug.
“For a majority of people with CML,” Cooper said, “Gleevec is a wonder drug, making the disease something like diabetes — controllable even if not curable.”
Although he said not a day went by when he did not think about his cancer, he and his wife, Naomi, are letting no grass grow under their feet. Since the diagnosis, they have traveled abroad several times, they visit their grandchildren often and celebrated their 40th anniversary with a lavish party that Cooper described as “a very life-affirming event.”
Max Watson, who has multiple myeloma, a usually deadly blood system cancer, has been able to control his disease for six years through the hitchhiker approach. His succession of treatments has included stem cell transplants, radiation and drug therapies. When one treatment failed, another became available.
Although at first Watson did not think long-term survival was possible, he was quoted in OncoLog, an M.D. Anderson report to physicians, as saying, “Eventually, I realized that this was something I would be dealing with for a long time.”
Stabilizing tumors
As Elizabeth Edwards’ prospects show, some solid tumors in advanced stages are also behaving more like chronic diseases, a result of research that has discovered molecular characteristics of specific cancers and the development of drugs that take advantage of a cancer’s Achilles’ heel.
Esteva described a breast cancer patient first treated with a mastectomy and the antiestrogen tamoxifen in 1995. Five years later, cancer had spread to her lungs, prompting treatment with a newer anticancer drug, an aromatase inhibitor. When that no longer worked, her cancer was found to possess a molecular factor, HER-2, and she began treatment with Herceptin, a designer drug tailor made to attack HER-2-positive breast cancer.
Herceptin therapy was able to stabilize her metastases for years, “something we had not seen before,” Esteva said.
The patient now receives a combination of Herceptin and another drug and enjoys a relatively normal quality of life, the doctor reported.
There has also been progress in prolonging survival in patients with metastatic kidney cancer.
Nizar Tannir, a specialist in genitourinary cancer at the Houston center, said that before 2005 there was not much to offer patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma. But within two years, three new drugs became available that have resulted in a 50 percent increase in overall survival.
Tannir recommends that patients given a bleak prognosis seek a second opinion from an expert at a major cancer center, in person if possible, or by phone or e-mail through their doctor’s office.
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