HEALTH : Gene, Cancer Treatment Linked

The newly isolated gene for elephant man’s disease appears to be a switch that can turn on cancer, a discovery that could lead to new treatments for brain tumors and other lethal cancers, researchers said today.

“The payoff here is going to be that we may come up with a treatment for brain tumors,” said Dr. Allan Rubenstein, medical director of the National Neurofibromatosis Foundation in New York. Elephant man’s disease is properly known as neurofibromatosis.

The first priority, he said, is to search for a treatment for neurofibromatosis. But that research holds promise for many others with cancer.

Research, Rubenstein said, “is going to explode.”

“It’s the kind of understanding we hoped discovery of the gene would lead to,” said the author of the new finding, Raymond L. White of the University of Utah.