Patient Zero: A New Method of Cancer Treatment Tested
By Tom Junod and Mark Warren; Esquire Magazine, December 2013 www.esquire.com
On May 7 of this year, I received a Facebook message from a woman named Stephanie Lee:
Hey Mark, I found that I have colon cancer today. I go for surgery Thursday morning. Please keep me in your prayers.
At the time, Stephanie was thirty-six and lived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in the town of Ocean Springs.
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The Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, a few blocks away, is as starkly different from the rest of Mount Sinai as it can be. As you enter, you see whiteboard walls covered with dense computational scrawl. "Oh, Lord," Stephanie said, turning in a circle to look at the room. "Does someone understand all this?" Schadt introduced himself to Stephanie and showed us back to his office, where she asked him to see her fly. He clacked away at his keyboard and up came the image of what the people in his lab had taken to calling the "Stephanie Fly," its visible tumor glowing green with a fluorescent protein so that it might be more easily observed.
"I cannot believe that my tumor is in a fly!" she said. "A fly!"
Just that morning, Schadt told us, Ross Cagan had called him to say that they no longer had to search for a combination of drugs. After further study of Stephanie's mutations, Cagan had found a single drug, already approved (though not for colorectal cancer), that killed the tumor in the fly and "looks like it will knock Stephanie's cancer out."
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