The love that develops between her and Beast provides a model of a healthy relationship built on mutual trust and understanding. Realistic details of 15th-century Breton life abound, providing an overall clear and accurate picture of the times. There is much talk about St. This is the website for my YA books about assassin nuns in medieval France.
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There is also a darkly mysterious fellow and mayhap even some kissing. Information about my middle grade novels can be found here: You can also sign up to receive blog updates by email here. His Fair Assassin Book Two. Those that serve Death are only too happy to offer her refuge—but at a price. The convent views Sybella, naturally skilled in the arts of both death and seduction, as one of their most dangerous weapons.
And while Sybella is a weapon of justice wrought by the god of Death himself, He must give her a reason to live.
When she discovers an unexpected ally imprisoned in the dungeons, will a daughter of Death find something other than vengeance to live for? Tall, as lanky and lightfooted as a greyhound, soft-spoken, Druker was 38 and had just spent nine years at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, part of Harvard Medical School, in Boston. At Dana-Farber, Druker landed in a laboratory studying how a normal human cell gives rise to runaway growth—malignancy.
Among other things, the lab focused on enzymes, proteins that change other molecules by breaking them down gut enzymes, for example, help digest food or linking them up hair follicle enzymes construct silky keratin fibers. Enzymes also figure in chain reactions, with one enzyme activating another and so on, until some complex cellular feat is accomplished; thus a cell can control a process such as growth or division by initiating a single reaction, like tipping the first domino.
A Triumph in the War Against Cancer | Science | Smithsonian
A necktie-wearing physician among jean-clad PhDs, Druker was racing competitors at other research centers to find a drug that suppresses cancer by disabling a critical enzyme and spares healthy tissues in the bargain. The alternative, targeted therapy, would fight cancer better with less collateral damage, or at least that was the notion that often kept Druker in the lab until 11 p.
Then things began to fall apart. I was a devoted researcher and scientist and physician. And that took a toll. Still, with a score of published studies and a nifty enzyme-measuring technique to show for his efforts, Druker thought he was ready to move up the Harvard ladder from instructor to assistant professor.
But it forced me to really say, Do I believe in myself? Am I going to make it, make a difference? He thinks things through before giving an answer. Druker grew up the youngest of four children in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended public schools, excelling at math and science.
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His father was a chemist at 3M whose work on printing processes was patented. His mother was a homemaker who got involved in school-board politics and ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature.
Dancing on His Grave: A True Story of Survival and Triumph
After graduating with a chemistry degree from UC San Diego, he stayed on, and in , his first year in medical school, he wrote a page paper hinting at a future he would help create. Company chemists had synthesized it and other compounds while searching for a new anti-inflammatory drug, but they had learned it could also block the activity of enzymes in a test tube. He also poured minute amounts of STI into a tray of thimble-size containers that held fluid and live white blood cells derived from a CML patient.
Even better, the cells died. Moreover, a large amount of STI given to healthy cells in a dish did no harm. But, of course, the road to dashed hopes is paved with experimental drugs that looked terrific in a test tube but failed in human beings. They need advocates, people who want to win. Druker plugged away, doing more experiments, such as inducing a form of CML in laboratory mice and subjecting them to STI By , having published numerous studies with co-workers in Portland and Switzerland, Druker believed the compound was ready to be tried in human beings.
For one thing, when dogs had been given the drug in intravenous form, it tended to cause blood clots at the end of the catheter. Novartis chemists spent months reformulating the liquid drug as a pill. But when the researchers gave large doses to dogs, the animals showed signs of liver damage. Some company officials, Druker recalled, advised dropping the project altogether. He had recruited two eminent oncologists to help run the clinical trial, Moshe Talpaz at the M.
All the CML patients enrolled in the three cities had undergone interferon therapy and either had failed to improve or had relapsed. None was eligible for a bone marrow transplant. Gradually increasing the STI dosage, the physicians observed by around six months that astronomical white blood counts of nearly , cells per cubic millimeter were falling to less than 10,, well within normal.
As word spread on the Internet, other CML patients wanted in. Druker pressed Novartis to produce more of the drug. The drug was difficult to make, Daniel Vasella, then the Novartis chief executive officer and now chairman of the board, would recall in his book about the drug, Magic Cancer Bullet. Plus, proving that it was both safe and effective would require a substantial investment. Druker phoned her the next day and said it would be months before she could enroll in a study—Novartis had not committed to producing more STI But, he added, the company might move more quickly if it heard directly from patients.
McNamara and a friend used an Internet site to create a petition requesting that the drug be made more widely available; thousands of CML patients endorsed it. The company increased STI production. The honor of announcing the early clinical results fell to Druker. In New Orleans on December 3, , he told an auditorium full of hematologists that all 31 patients in the study responded favorably to STI, with the white blood cell counts of 30 falling to normal within a month. Her white blood count exceeded ,, more than 20 times normal.
Later that day, the STI pill stayed down. And the next, and so on. White count had come down. It was truly miraculous. By the late winter of , Druker and his collaborators had pooled much of their STI data: Ten years ago this month, the U. It was a defining moment. At a Washington, D.
Today, Suzan McNamara would agree that future is good. And I came back in one and a half months 20 pounds heavier and full of life. Now 44, she lives in Montreal and works in Ottawa for Health Canada, a federal agency.
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Still on Gleevec, she runs several miles a few times a week. In January she wed her longtime boyfriend, Derek Tahamont, in Hawaii. Gleevec has encouraged people to think cancer is not always a deadly invader that must be annihilated but a chronic ailment that can be managed, like diabetes. In follow-up studies led by Druker, some 90 percent of newly diagnosed CML patients who began taking Gleevec had survived five years. Back when LaDonna Lopossa was 60, she recalled, Druker said he would keep her alive until she was Then she reached that milestone.
The Lopossas live in a bungalow in a state-subsidized senior-citizen housing complex across the street from a family that keeps hens in the yard and lets George grow herbs. A framed magazine ad for Gleevec featuring LaDonna hangs on a living room wall. Two portraits of Christ grace a dining room wall. Fortunately, medical scientists and drug companies had developed two new CML drugs, each disabling the BCR-ABL enzyme in a different fashion and compensating for a type of Gleevec resistance. A bright yellow bicycle-racing jersey worn and autographed by the Tour de France champ and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong hung framed on the wall.
It was a clear day and the great vanilla ice-cream scoop of Mount St. Helens was visible out the window facing north and the storybook white triangle of Mount Hood could be seen through the window facing east. The magazine had sent a reporter named Alexandra Hardy to interview the dragon-slaying physician at the hospital in the clouds.
The two were married in and are parents to Holden, Julia and Claire. To some observers, the Gleevec fable soon lost its luster.
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Sawyers said he got tired of researchers saying Gleevec was a one-off, a lucky shot. Asked about the reasons for the price increase, a Novartis spokeswoman declined to comment. In any event, a drug that Novartis balked at developing because the market was too small is now a blockbuster. To be sure, Novartis has provided free or discounted medication to low-income patients.