The Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center at West Virginia University is two decades old. It seems as though the facility has been around for a much longer time.
We have learned a great deal about cancer in the past thirty years. So much so, that the timeline of the historical record of mankind’s suffering from this disease has been drastically skewed. In 1980, actor Steve McQueen traveled to Mexico where he took laetrile treatments to try and cure his mesothelioma. Just last week, cancer survivor Lance Armstrong was back in the hospital, this time for a broken collarbone suffered while riding his bicycle.
Steve McQueen, the daredevil biker who did everything but sing “Edelweiss” as he toured the German countryside when filming “The Great Escape”, was hopelessly condemned by cancer. Lance Armstrong, on the other hand, not only survived testicular cancer but went on to become France’s most famous two-wheeling tourist. He didn’t sing “Edelweiss” either, but he did date Sheryl Crowe for awhile.
We have gone from cancer being a certain death sentence to being “doable” in a moment of time.
The first designed chemotherapy drug, methotrexate, appeared exactly sixty years ago. The drug proved effective against childhood leukemia, but medical science as a whole was skeptical that childhood leukemia was even curable.
It’s not that humans haven’t known about cancer for a long time. The Greeks and Romans used their respective words for “crab” to also define cancer. Cancerous tumors resemble the appearance of a crab.
The Greek physician Hippocrates described cancer about 400 B. C. From this point, you can fast-forward to the start of the twentieth century because not much happened to expand man’s knowledge of cancer during that epoch. The year 1902 stands out, however, with Madame Curie’s discovery of radium and Thomas Edison’s growing manufacture of X-ray machines. It wasn’t long after until people learned about radiation and its consequences from overexposure.
Many of you remember wearing a lead apron while your dentist hid in a concrete bunker and pushed a button to X-ray your teeth. The apron protected your torso (and little else) from inadvertent overexposure. Unless you wore a tin foil hat, you can probably assume that some of your brain cells were fried. Today, however, radiation oncologists can aim pinpoint beams of radiation at the actual tumor site.
The gains that we have made in curing cancer during the last thirty years are due in large part to a greatly expanded National Cancer Institute and the advent of regional cancer centers such as MBRCC. As patients, we tend to focus on individual cancer treatment. While the cancer center provides state-of-the-art patient treatment, its role goes far beyond that.
The research laboratories at MBRCC and the Health Science Center have had notable success in making critical discoveries. For example, Dr. Laura Gibson’s team discovered that cancer cells can hide in the bone marrow where they cannot be reached by chemotherapy drugs. And Dr. Wei-Shau Hu discovered that two retroviruses can infect the same cell and swap DNA.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then kudos to Dr. Kimberly Horn and Dr. Geri Dino of WVU’s Health Science Center. In partnership with MBRCC, Drs. Horn and Dino developed the “Not On Tobacco” program which has been the model for teenage tobacco cessation programs across the nation. The Centers for Disease Control recently launched a website to promote the N-O-T program.
As part of its outreach mission, the MBRCC will be sending Bonnie’s Bus, a mobile mammogram unit, around the state. Women in rural areas will soon find much easier access to digital mammography.
The MBRCC opened its Blood and Marrow Transplantation program in 1992 and it remains the only accredited such program in West Virginia.
The MBRCC is a matrix cancer center and was designed to take advantage of not only the HSC’s elements but the WVU campus as a whole. It has been a success. This month, the MBRCC will double in size when it dedicates its expanded facility.
I do hope, however, that cancer is cured before the MBRCC celebrates forty years.
There is a good benchmark to show how far we have come in treating cancer. One of the drugs that cured Lance Armstrong was discovered in 1845 and named Peyrone’s salt after its discoverer. Now called cisplatin, its anticancer properties were discovered quite by accident in 1970. Cisplatin began clinical trials in 1978, just in time to save Lance Armstrong.
