These medicines in development should accelerate the progress that is already being made. For the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control reported in 1999 that death rates from cancer are falling. Particularly notable are declining death rates from breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer and leukemia. Better treatments, including more powerful and targeted prescription drugs, are a major factor in the decline. Scientists are expressing even more hope for the future, as researchers unravel the mystery of how cancer works.
Cancer is no longer a black box.
Building on the growing knowledge of how cancer works, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are working on a number of novel and promising ways to fight the disease. Last year, Harvard University researchers made headlines by successfully shrinking tumors in mice by this method. Efforts to turn this experiment into a medicine for human cancer patients have proved difficult, but now there are clinical trials being conducted on various drugs that use this mechanism to fight multiple myeloma, lung cancer, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, melanoma and other cancers. A vaccine made from a patient's own surgically removed colon tumor that is injected into the patient to boost the immune system to fight a recurrence of the cancer. According to a study published in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, the vaccine reduced the five-year recurrence rate by 61 percent.