The Tireless Hunter

摘要

Some miracle drugs emerge from eureka moments, but more often a new compound results from years of meticulous, plodding work championed by a true believer. And so it is for a drug approved last month to treat a deadly cancer of the blood known as mul-tiple myeloma. Velcade, from Millennium Pharmaceuticals, is the first new treatment approved for myeloma in a decade. Myeloma afflicts 50,000 people a year and kills 70% of patients within five years of diagnosis. Yet in midstage trials Velcade shrank tumors in 28% of 188 patients who had failed two other therapies; 20% went into remission. Those results so impressed regulators that they approved the drug in only four months. "It's a dream of a lifetime," says chemist Julian Adams, 48, head of drug discovery for Millennium.