Flora's story
When you have cancer, who you know can mean the difference between life and death. Flora Diaz (a pseudonym) found this out when her breast cancer reappeared in the fall of 2003. When it was first discovered seven months earlier, Flora had a mastectomy followed by radiation and tamoxifen to wipe out any lingering cancer cells. However, a few rogue cells had evaded the treatment and reappeared, invading the remaining breast and penetrating into the chest wall. The cells infiltrated nearby lymph nodes, where they could escape into the bloodstream and reach more distant parts of the body.
Flora's doctor put her on three standard chemotherapy drugs to try to halt the tumors, but the cancer cells were unfazed. They kept growing, and suddenly, Flora's future looked bleak. Except that by extraordinary happenstance, Flora's son, Robert, knew exactly what to do.
Robert was in medical school and had been working for an orphan disease foundation that was screening drugs that are already on the market, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for ailments ranging from athlete's foot to Alzheimer's disease. If such drugs showed activity in a disease model, it could be taken by patients the next day without going through a lengthy clinical trial.
Robert knew that his mother had very little time, and that her best chance lay in testing every available medication in the world to see if any would kill her cancer cells. He flew down to Florida to attend his mother's next operation. As soon as the tumor was taken out, he processed it right in the operating room, freezing the living tumor cells in liquid nitrogen. He flew with the precious flask to a research laboratory where he had talked one of the scientists into helping him grow the cells, put them into 96-well plates and dose each tiny clump of living cancer cells with a drug, using the lab's robotic machinery. In all, they tested nearly 6,000 drugs, including virtually every drug in the FDA-approved drug list along with drugs approved in other countries. In less than three weeks, they found nearly 40 "hits"—drugs that killed the cancer cells. All of this cost $40,000—a lot of money for a medical student, but well worth it if it gave his mother a fighting chance.
By this time, Flora was going rapidly downhill. She was terribly frail from the chemotherapy, and her kidneys were failing. Robert and Flora's doctor made a desperate decision: take her off the chemotherapy and put her on one of the drugs that had worked in Robert's experiment. One of these was a drug to treat osteoporosis, the bone-thinning that plagues older women and cancer patients. It was also safe to take. Soon Flora stopped the toxic chemotherapy drugs and began taking "Robert's drug." Almost immediately, her tumors stopped growing. A few weeks later, they started to shrink. Encouraged, she had surgery to take out as much tumor as possible. What was left continued to shrink. By Thanksgiving, they were gone. To this day, Flora remains cancer free.
