He Won His Battle With Cancer

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SU2C is not the only independent group shaking things up. The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation used a pay-for-results funding model that has more to do with Silicon Valley than Big Pharma to support research that in four years got four new treatments to patients--Thalomid, Velcade, Revlimid and Doxil. That's about six years faster than the decade it usually takes for such drug development and rollout. Multiple myeloma is a rare cancer of the bone marrow that sickens about 20,000 Americans each year--precisely the uncommon form of the disease that often falls into the research cracks. The MMRF benefited from the aggressive work of founder Kathy Giusti, a multiple-myeloma survivor and former pharmaceutical executive. When she and her group first raised enough money to start funding research, she faced a feeding frenzy of research applicants. "They will do what they have to do to get grant money. They're desperate," she says.

The MMRF made sure it got the most from its grant dollars by adopting an enforced-collaboration model in 2004, linking work at four cancer centers into a consortium managed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and providing them all with patients, tissue samples and a set of targets and goals. "The odds of a cure coming from one center are nil," Giusti says. "You need a mutual fund to fight cancer." From not having a single drug in the pipeline, the MMRF now has 30, half of them in clinical trials. The average lifespan of a multiple-myeloma patient has been extended by three years, to seven.

If the MMRF model works for a single, specialized cancer, it's not clear that a group like Stand Up to Cancer--which is casting a far wider research net--will show the same results. But clinicians say it's worth trying. "There needs to be a mechanism whereby we can bring groups of people together from different institutions in one group," says DuBois, who is part of SU2C's scientific panel. At the same time, there is hope that the 20% of grants SU2C is setting aside for outside-the-box research will yield something semimiraculous.

The strategy is often compared to that of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atom bomb, or the Apollo program, which put astronauts on the moon. Some worry that it oversimplifies things. "This isn't an engineering problem," says the NIH's Harris. "It's a problem in which we know only parts of the solution."

But more communication among scientists is always better than less, and besides, there may be more engineering to beating cancer than people realize. MIT, which knows a thing or two about designing things, is building a $100 million research center that will put together biologists and chemists with engineers skilled in such arts as nanofabrication. "We are going to breed a group of people who are totally aware of the cancer problem and totally aware of the modern tools and computational powers of engineers," says Sharp.

MIT plans to make dream-team proposals, which Sharp views as a chance to loose the forces of science on the particularly diabolical forms of cancer. One of MIT's strategies is to build nanomolecules that, when injected into the body, can hunt for cancer cells, bind to them and deliver therapies directly to the bad cells; or to build nanomolecules that could locate abnormal genes and silence them. "It's MIT," says Sharp. "We shake and bake."

None of this absolves the rest of us from our own behavior. Think of all those fools standing in front of office buildings and restaurants grabbing a cigarette. Think of our national epidemic of obesity, which researchers believe has many links to cancer.

Cancer has become a little too familiar to us, too much a part of our social fabric. We embrace it with runs and walks and swims and bike rides that bring people together to raise funds and hopes and share their grief. "It's tough. We are a very optimistic organization, and all of our materials are about living every day to the fullest and living strong and fighting cancer. But at the end of the day, if you look at what's happened, some would argue that we haven't been that successful," says LAF's Ulman.

At a Livestrong ride, run and walk in the Philadelphia area, some 5,000 people took part on a beautiful summer day to raise $3 million for the LAF. "These aren't fun runs," says Armstrong. "They are very emotional, tearful times." Some participants had cancer; some were survivors. And most of those who rode by bore on their backs the names of dead relatives, a rolling graveyard passing through the placid Pennsylvania countryside.