When virologist Beata Halassy faced a third recurrence of breast cancer, she made a decision that defied standard medical protocols and terrified her colleagues. Unwilling to endure another round of chemotherapy, she turned to her own laboratory for a solution. Halassy cultivated specific viruses and injected them directly into her own tumor, becoming both the …
For decades, cancer treatment has followed a familiar pattern. First comes diagnosis, then a combination of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or targeted drugs, often customized to the molecular signature of a patient’s tumor. While this approach has saved many lives, it has also revealed a hard truth. Cancer, especially solid tumors like breast cancer, is remarkably …
Prostate cancer develops resistance. Treatments work for years, then stop working. Patients who responded well to therapy suddenly face a disease that ignores their medication. Doctors watch helplessly as cancer spreads and becomes lethal in 10 to 20 percent of cases within five years. But researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys may have found a way …
The syringe contained no poison to kill cancer cells, no radioactive particles to burn through tissue, no harsh chemicals to ravage a patient’s body. Instead, it held something far more revolutionary: a set of molecular instructions that would transform a 67-year-old scientist’s immune system into a personalized cancer-hunting army. Janusz Racz didn’t know it as …
For decades, a cancer diagnosis has often pushed patients toward a familiar set of choices. Surgeons could cut. Radiation teams could aim beams at diseased tissue. Chemotherapy could move through the body in search of malignant cells. Each path has saved lives, yet each can leave patients facing pain, fatigue, scarring or long recovery. A …
Something in the human brain can go wrong in ways that modern medicine still cannot fix. Every year, more than 14,000 Americans learn they have glioblastoma, a cancer so aggressive and so resistant to treatment that most patients survive barely more than a year after diagnosis. Surgery can remove parts of it, but the cancer …