Plotting Against the Enemy

If you passed him on the street, you’d hardly notice Dennis Slamon. He’s not tall, he’s not strikingly handsome, and he doesn’t radiate the kind of Hollywoodian glow that makes you turn your head when he walks by.

But up close it’s different. The man’s intensity is so real it assaults you with an energy that emanates from someplace deep in him, a core fire that’s there when he needs it . . . and he’s needed it over the past dozen years.

What he’s done is create a new and powerful weapon in the fight against cancer. While most others in that tight little world called the scientific community were scoffing at his effort, the 50-year-old coal miner’s son was developing an antibody for an aggressive form of breast cancer.

“They thought he was crazy at first,” a colleague says. “He put his career on the line, and he won. Now they’re all coming around.”

Dennis Slamon, MD and PhD, is director of the Revlon/UCLA Women’s Cancer Research Program at the university’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Plowing through jungles of skepticism while conducting laboratory and clinical research, he came to a mountain of gold at the end: the discovery of a defective gene, HER2/neu, present in about 30% of the women with the type of breast cancer that spreads quickly.

The result was a drug called Herceptin and a new discipline of research in a war we may be winning.

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I came upon Slamon more or less by accident. I was touring the cancer center, a wondrous place of curing and caring, when his name was mentioned. While those who said it didn’t exactly fall to their knees, they did acknowledge his achievement with respect, if not reverential awe.

Slamon doesn’t seem to demand that kind of hoo-ha. He’s a soft-spoken, deadly serious star in a business where egos can rival those of the NBA’s most vocal prima donnas. But his goal isn’t a ball through a net; it’s to achieve an objective in human health that will last long after guys with orange hair and rings in their noses are, thank God, forgotten.

I met Slamon in a tiny office near his lab, and he tried to explain to me just what he’d done. Science is not among my strengths, but by listening and reading, I did learn that Herceptin attacks the cells that produce HER2, and by one estimate, increases the cancer-killing ability of chemotherapy 100 times. It’s the first drug to target cancer at the level of defective genes.

“Half of the women we’ve treated have an outstanding response to the drug,” Slamon said, “and half don’t. We want to know why.”

The why is what drives science forward. “If you are interested in the biology of human disease,” he adds, “there is no greater challenge than to discover what goes wrong. That’s what we’re after.”

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The Jonsson Cancer Center is a sprawling, multidisciplined place that treats cancer, soothes its patients, explores its properties and defines it as a serious enemy in humanity’s endless war for survival. Cancer, as a researcher told me, isn’t one disease, it’s 100 diseases.

Slamon’s discovery is important not just for its immediate results, but for its portent. Herceptin, approved just last year by the FDA, opens a whole new pathway in the treatment of cancer. Its potential is immense.

“The word ‘cure’ carries so much emotion,” Slamon says. “Sure, we should be able to cure cancer as we explore these pathways, but we may be able to do something better: prevent it. That’s an achievable goal in the next decade.”

“We’re so close to a cure, and so far,” Judy Gasson said later. She’s the director of the Jonsson center. “Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t have the potential to impact cancer, and now we have. We’re in a hurry. Statistics are breathing down our neck.”

She refers to Herceptin as a “smart bomb,” because it targets specific cancer cells. “We’re at the very edge of new research, but you can’t be just at the edge,” she said. “You have to be before the edge.”

About 600,000 Americans die each year from all kinds of cancer. One was a man named Bob Cuthbertson, who helped guide me through my early years of newspapering. Brain cancer ate at the essence of who he was, reducing him at the end to a frail, shadow image. I saw him a few days before he died. He said, “Why can’t they save me?”

“When you care for cancer patients, the impact of their disease comes home loud and clear,” Slamon said to me in a very soft voice in a very quiet room. “You remember them.”

Ah, yes.

Al Martinez’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.