Ratner's work was well known to Watson. Watson, like Mark Altschule MD of Harvard could not explain why/how Ratner's treatment of Altschule's patient, Mrs J Edward Spyke Jr worked. See The LANCET p106, JAN 14, 1978.
Ratner also left us an easy pathway for the explication of the cause and treatment of ALS, a previously unknown ALS pathology.
Cold Spring Harbor knows much about many small things.
If you have cancer take aspirin and metformin. Don't see your mind short. Safe, cheap, and effective is not what drug companies want. A patient to a pharmaceutical company has resemblance to ......
See also Faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org faustman dl, pubmed.org ristori + BCG
COLD
SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. — Some of the world’s finest scientists live in a
former whaling village on the North Shore of Long Island, in a compound
reminiscent of an army post.
In
this pastoral setting, they have very self-consciously taken themselves
out of the real world into a cerebral one, where they are searching for
the genetic origins of cancer and the drugs to cure it.
But
despite the many breakthroughs that have taken place here, at Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory, there is one thing that has been lacking:
human subjects.
To
remedy that shortcoming, the lab is about to embark on a new
collaboration between pure science and clinical science with North
Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, a nearby hospital system that
can offer a wealth of patients to study.
“The
hardest part of doing clinical research is enrolling patients in
clinical trials,” said Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, chief executive of the
Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-L.I.J. “You have
to have lots and lots of patients.”
North
Shore-L.I.J., which has 19 hospitals spread through Long Island,
Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island and Westchester County, offers a
genetically diverse patient base in the millions with different racial
and ethnic backgrounds. It diagnoses and treats cancer in more than 16,000 new patients a year.
Dr.
Bruce Stillman, chief executive of Cold Spring Harbor lab, recalled
arriving there in 1979 to work as a postdoctoral fellow under James D.
Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, when “we
were still trying to figure out what cancer was.”
Dr.
Stillman said he began seriously considering the hospital collaboration
about a year ago, because he was frustrated by not being able to move
quickly from preclinical studies of cancer in the lab to the next stage
of trying out therapies in people.
He approached the idea with some trepidation about whether it would lead the laboratory in the wrong direction.
“I
didn’t want to dilute the basic science and become applied research,”
he said. “Yet the opportunities were just screaming out.”
From the hospital system’s point of view, an affiliation with an institution known for its Nobel laureates is good branding.
Much
cancer research is now focused on matching treatments to the genetic
makeup of a tumor or even a patient. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a
pioneer in using three-dimensional methods to culture tumor cells, as
opposed to the conventional two-dimensional cultures many laboratories
use. In these three-dimensional cultures, tumor cells form
beach-ball-like structures of hundreds of cells called organoids, which
better mimic the way cancer functions in real life. Its scientists also
study cancer tumors in mice.
Still,
there are limits even to such advanced techniques. When scientists find
a genetic target in the lab, and a drug that might work on it, Dr.
Stillman said, “we need to understand whether it’s really working in the
patient.”
More
than $120 million will be invested in the collaboration over the next
10 years. Over time, Dr. Stillman said, the lab will build up a research
unit in the hospital that will parallel the one it has for animals at
Cold Spring Harbor. The closest comparison, he said, would be with
academic medical centers like Massachusetts General, Dana Farber,
Memorial Sloan Kettering and Johns Hopkins. But, he added, “It’s very
rare to have scientists working with clinicians and suggesting what the
clinicians do.”
One
advantage of having human subjects is that some of the most interesting
advances in medicine have come through serendipity — from discovering
that a drug that fails for one disease is actually effective in another.
In
a cluster of relatively new buildings designed to echo the old whaling
architecture, researchers are working on cures for all kinds of cancers.
Lindsey Baker, 31, a postdoctoral fellow in cancer biology, said she
was excited by the new collaboration because cancer drug trials were
often done in elite institutions where most of the patients were white
and affluent. North Shore, she said, offers the opportunity to look at
other racial and economic groups.
There
are also practical advantages to working with a nearby hospital, she
said, since the faster a tissue sample is delivered, the healthier it is
and thus the better for research.
Although
researchers will not know the identities of the patients who have given
tissue samples, if a breakthrough discovery were made, it would be
possible to retrace the identity of the donor and perhaps apply the new
knowledge to that person’s treatment.
Dr.
Chris Vakoc, who is studying acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer, is
one of the resident scientists. His house, its porch littered with
children’s toys, overlooks the harbor. He said clinicians often had a
more intuitive sense of what worked in their patients than pure
scientists.
“We
tend to always think about things in a molecular way,” Dr. Vakoc said.
“It’s very different treating a patient. Sometimes it’s kind of humbling
to hear them say, ‘I doubt this is going to work.’ ”
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