From the President:
It is not a distinction to be envied, but cancer this year became the number one cause of death for Americans under the age of 85, surpassing heart disease, which today claims half as many lives as it did in the 1930s.
Though the statistics are staggering — nearly 1.4 million cancer diagnoses a year in this country, and nearly 600,000 deaths — cancer's "ascendance" to the top of the mortality charts doesn't reflect an increase in the number of people dying of the disease. On the contrary, cancer death rates have been falling since 1999, but, at about 1 percent a year, much more slowly than those for heart disease.
Our challenge as physicians, researchers, caregivers, and support staff is to achieve in our specialty what has been so dramatically accomplished in coronary disease: a decades-long reduction not only in the number of people who contract cancer, but in the impact and lethality of the disease, with treatments that are gentler than many of those used today. It will take a combination of dedicated scientific work, public health measures, and partnerships between patients and physicians. Steps toward prevention and early detection will also be critical, as they have been in cardiology.
This issue of Paths of Progress illustrates a variety of ways that we at Dana-Farber are taking up the challenge. You'll read about efforts to curtail tumors' growth by depriving them of blood, new approaches to treating pancreatic cancer, and how Dana-Farber scientists share research findings with colleagues around the world.
Finally, a story on exploiting the body's natural process of "programmed cell death," or apoptosis, as a new weapon against cancer comes at a sad and poignant time for all of us at Dana-Farber. A pioneer of this work, Stanley Korsmeyer, MD, died in March of the disease he has done so much to combat. We will miss him not only as a great scientist, but even more as a wonderful friend and colleague.
Edward J. Benz Jr., MD
President, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
