Cancer Researcher Urges Caution About Drug Discovery

The man who discovered a drug combination that wipes out cancer in mice called the treatment “very promising” but urged caution Sunday, saying the success might not carry over to humans.

Dr. Judah Folkman, a Harvard professor and researcher at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, said the drugs, which have been proved to wipe out all forms of cancer in mice, might have potentially dramatic effects on human cancers.

“But we have to be careful with expectations,” Folkman warned. “We know the proteins work on mice, but the important thing is determining whether they work on people.”

Researchers hope within a year to begin testing the drugs on humans.

“I am putting nothing on higher priority than getting this into clinical trials,” Dr. Richard D. Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute, was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times. The mouse studies are “remarkable and wonderful.”

The drugs, angiostatin and endostatin, work by cutting off the blood supply to tumors. Given intravenously, the drugs have caused tumors in mice to shrink or disappear altogether.

The development of the pair, called anti-angiogenesis drugs, caps a 30-year research process that began when Folkman reasoned that tumors cannot grow or spread without a steady blood supply.

A major development in the work to find cancer inhibitors came more than a decade ago when Folkman and other researchers developed a first generation of cancer-inhibiting drugs that slowed the growth of tumors in animals.

Like Folkman, Klausner urged caution, saying that, in human trials, he wanted to emphasize “the ifs.”

Nobel laureate Dr. James Watson, who directs a cancer research center in New York, says Folkman’s research might be as significant as Charles Darwin’s.

“Judah is going to cure cancer in two years,” Watson told the newspaper.