A few times in these pages I have recounted the tale of UCLA scientist Dennis Slamon and the difficulties he faced convincing Bay-area biotech firm Genentech to market a drug that seemed promising for treatment of Her-2 positive breast cancer. I came across his story in The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize winning history of cancer which I read a few years back. As I remembered it, Genentech turned Slamon away because there were not enough woman with Her-2 positive breast cancer to make the drug profitable.
I have remembered it wrong.
Having recently had opportunity to reread TEoAM, I discovered to my horror that I am confounding details of Slamon's story with those of Brian Drucker, a faculty member at the Oregon Health and Science University. Mukherjee describes Drucker's struggle to get the pharmaceutical giant Novartis to manufacture a drug he helped develop for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). It was Novartis who declined Drucker because too few people suffered from CML to make Drucker's drug profitable. Genentech indeed turned away Slamon, but their reasoning was more that the company had redirected its efforts to less risky (and, it must be said, more profitable) applications that no longer included cancer drugs. (Genentech scientists sided with Slamon -- some of whom even collaborated with him -- but Genentech management did not.)
The point here isn't to demonize Genentech or Novartis. A for-profit company has legitimate financial concerns it cannot ignore. They can't help anyone if they're bankrupt. And, we should note, both companies eventually relented and manufactured the drugs (Slamon's drug as Herceptin and Drucker's as Gleevec). Rather, the point is to demonstrate the critical role university research plays in the development of new treatments and cures. It's unlikely that Herceptin or Gleevec would have saved a single cancer patient had Slamon and Drucker been working in the private sector. Only after both scientists went forward with successful clinical trials at their respective universities did industry come around. And their discoveries would never have been made in the first place had they not been given the opportunity to freely explore ideas in a system that encourages basic research. A system that permits the kind of open-ended investigation that a for-profit company simply cannot or will not risk.
That system is made possible by funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Funding that comes from your tax dollars. Stories like that of Dennis Slamon and Brian Drucker demonstrate the connection of basic research to cures, how what might seem like esoteric laboratory diversions (Slamon's focus was retroviruses and Drucker was studying protein shape) connect to the clinic, to the bedside, and ultimately to everyday life. Herceptin and Gleevec and countless other drugs, treatments, and medical advances are impossible without the knowledge base university research provides. These are real results; they're what you get for your money. And they're what will vanish without continued support. No funding, no cures. That is what any politician who is for slashing the science budget isn't telling you.
And so, my task now is to comb through all 163 previous LabKitty posts and fix any wrong versions of the Slamon story that appear, and endeavor to do better in the future. Hopefully, you will believe me when I say such mistakes don't have an ulterior motive, they simply overwhelmed my fact checker. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupid, as the saying goes. Or, as Einstein might have said: Raffinert ist der Herr LabKitty, aber Bodschaft ist er nicht.
I have remembered it wrong.
Having recently had opportunity to reread TEoAM, I discovered to my horror that I am confounding details of Slamon's story with those of Brian Drucker, a faculty member at the Oregon Health and Science University. Mukherjee describes Drucker's struggle to get the pharmaceutical giant Novartis to manufacture a drug he helped develop for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). It was Novartis who declined Drucker because too few people suffered from CML to make Drucker's drug profitable. Genentech indeed turned away Slamon, but their reasoning was more that the company had redirected its efforts to less risky (and, it must be said, more profitable) applications that no longer included cancer drugs. (Genentech scientists sided with Slamon -- some of whom even collaborated with him -- but Genentech management did not.)
The point here isn't to demonize Genentech or Novartis. A for-profit company has legitimate financial concerns it cannot ignore. They can't help anyone if they're bankrupt. And, we should note, both companies eventually relented and manufactured the drugs (Slamon's drug as Herceptin and Drucker's as Gleevec). Rather, the point is to demonstrate the critical role university research plays in the development of new treatments and cures. It's unlikely that Herceptin or Gleevec would have saved a single cancer patient had Slamon and Drucker been working in the private sector. Only after both scientists went forward with successful clinical trials at their respective universities did industry come around. And their discoveries would never have been made in the first place had they not been given the opportunity to freely explore ideas in a system that encourages basic research. A system that permits the kind of open-ended investigation that a for-profit company simply cannot or will not risk.
That system is made possible by funding from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Funding that comes from your tax dollars. Stories like that of Dennis Slamon and Brian Drucker demonstrate the connection of basic research to cures, how what might seem like esoteric laboratory diversions (Slamon's focus was retroviruses and Drucker was studying protein shape) connect to the clinic, to the bedside, and ultimately to everyday life. Herceptin and Gleevec and countless other drugs, treatments, and medical advances are impossible without the knowledge base university research provides. These are real results; they're what you get for your money. And they're what will vanish without continued support. No funding, no cures. That is what any politician who is for slashing the science budget isn't telling you.
And so, my task now is to comb through all 163 previous LabKitty posts and fix any wrong versions of the Slamon story that appear, and endeavor to do better in the future. Hopefully, you will believe me when I say such mistakes don't have an ulterior motive, they simply overwhelmed my fact checker. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupid, as the saying goes. Or, as Einstein might have said: Raffinert ist der Herr LabKitty, aber Bodschaft ist er nicht.
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