Grace Silva has a horrible form of thyroid cancer that is considered untreatable — usually, patients are sent to a hospice and die within months of learning they have the disease. But she is still alive four years after her diagnosis. She is what cancer doctors call an exceptional responder: someone who defies all expectations by responding dramatically to a drug tried not with a real rationale but more out of a doctor’s desperate urge to do something. The annals of medicine are full of stories of exceptional responders, but until recently, they were just that: stories. Case histories that could not be generalized because there was no way to know why these patients got better when others did not. But now, with the advent of rapid and inexpensive gene sequencing, the National Cancer Institute has started a nationwide search for people like Mrs. Silva to try to figure out the genetic changes that allowed them to respond.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 21:03:30 +0000
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