Dateline DFCI
Testimony raises awareness of multiple myeloma
Two days after former vice-presidential candidate and New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro revealed publicly that she has multiple myeloma, she and her Dana-Farber physician, Kenneth Anderson, MD, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the need to develop new and better treatments for the disease.
Ferraro and Anderson's June 21 appearance before the Senate's Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services was part of a broader effort to raise awareness of myeloma, a cancer of the body's blood-forming tissue that is almost always fatal. That same week, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation sponsored a major lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to promote a new strategy for developing therapies for blood cancers.
Geraldine Ferraro testifies before the Senate subcommittee session in June.
The advocacy worked. On June 22, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Patty Murray of Washington, and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii cosponsored a bill to allocate $250 million a year for research and education on blood cancers.
Myeloma investigators "need you and your colleagues in the Congress to help," Ferraro told subcommittee members. "They need more awareness and attention paid to blood cancers so that people will be tested and diagnosed earlier; they need research dollars to continue to search for new treatments and a cure; and they need faster approval by the FDA of new drugs."
News of Ferraro's illness refocused attention on a disease that, though rare, has one of the fastest-growing mortality rates of any type of cancer. Deaths from myeloma rose 34 percent between 1973 and 1999, with 11,000 Americans now succumbing annually to the disease. It is among the top 10 causes of death for African-Americans.
Chemotherapy can extend patients' lives by an average of three to four years. Recently, however, researchers have gained a deeper understanding of how myeloma cells function and interact with surrounding tissue, and this knowledge has inspired them to devise some innovative ways of attacking the disease, as reported in the spring 2001 Paths of Progress.
Many of these advances have occurred at Dana-Farber's Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, which Anderson directs. Investigators there have pioneered the use of the drug thalidomide against myeloma and are testing ways to use the immune system as an anti-myeloma weapon. The Institute's leadership in myeloma research is complemented by its commitment to providing quality patient care, Anderson remarks.
"Once novel therapies are identified in laboratory studies to be of potential benefit to patients, there is an urgent need for rapidly moving these agents from the bench to the bedside [where their clinical use can be tested]," Anderson told the Senate subcommittee. "The need is particularly immediate for patients with myeloma, for whom no curative therapy currently exists."
