"“I was shocked because that was the first time I had to face my own mortality,” says Mann. “Immediately you're going to think of your family,” he says of the diagnosis. He realized his daughter would be 8 years old when he died. Her time with him looked scarce. “And, you know, I was trying to bargain for more.” So he volunteered for clinical trials of every experimental new drug he could."
"“By then, I was like, really tired,” he says. “You know, I'd sleep for eight hours, drink two cups of coffee, wake up and feel like I never went to bed. And I really lost a lot of weight. So I asked the doctor, were there any more drugs?” There was one: the drug that became Gleevec. Mann started taking it in August 1998, as part of a clinical trial."
"“I did it in a pretty decent time, too,” he says. Gleevec would eventually become one of the first targeted cancer therapies approved by the Food and Drug Administration, helping to usher in a new era in cancer treatment. But getting there wasn't so simple. The setback In the 1970s, oncologist Brian Druker had an idea that at the time was pretty new in cancer medicine: What if instead of just trying to kill cancer cells and hoping that healthy cells were mostly spared, you could target the reason that cancer cells were growi"
Mel Mann was diagnosed with aggressive chronic myeloid leukemia at age 37 in January 1995 after MRI results revealed bone marrow problems. Doctors predicted he would live about three years, prompting him to focus on family and to seek more time through participation in experimental drug trials. He experienced fatigue, weight loss, and limited benefit from earlier treatments, but a clinical trial of the drug later known as Gleevec began in August 1998. By June 1999, he was running a marathon in Anchorage, Alaska. Gleevec later became one of the first targeted cancer therapies approved by the FDA, helping start a new era in cancer treatment.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]