- Seizing the moment: Introduction | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s and the future
1950s
The belief that scientific progress and patient care go hand-in-hand – still a guiding principle for Dana-Farber – was embodied in the growing Jimmy Fund Building (below, left), which housed both laboratories and the Jimmy Fund Clinic.
By the late 1950s, advances in the treatment of Wilms tumor, the most common kidney tumor of childhood, had caused cure rates to climb to the unlofty level of about 45 percent at the very best hospitals. If not controlled by therapy, cancer cells from the kidney usually spread to the lungs, liver, and brain, causing death.
Surgical advances pioneered by William Ladd, MD, and Robert Gross, MD, of Children's Hospital Boston made it possible to remove diseased kidneys without rupturing embedded tumors and spilling cancer cells. Too often, however, the cancer reappeared in the abdomen and began its metastatic march to other parts of the body. Aiming radiation therapy at the "tumor bed" in the abdomen following surgery – a technique devised by Edward Neuhauser, MD, of Children's – caused many remaining cancer cells to die and raised cure rates slightly.
Sidney Farber and his colleagues focused on young patients whose disease returned even after treatment with surgery and radiation. Their theory was that in many cases the children's cancer had already metastasized by the time it had been discovered. Their approach was to find a drug that could travel the bloodstream and kill any residual cancer cells before they took root and grew.
Reading a German study from 1952, Farber found that a new antibiotic called cactinomycin had antitumor activity in research animals. In late 1954, he tested a similar, but safer, antibiotic called dactinomycin in a terminally ill child with Wilms tumor that had spread to both lungs. As expected, the child died, but an autopsy showed something that had never been seen before in cancer treatment: Metastatic tumors throughout the patient's body had died, disappeared, or been replaced by harmless scar tissue.
Dr. Farber and colleagues sought a drug that could wipe out remaining cancer cells before they took root and grew.
That single result suggested that dactinomycin could be the basis of the standard therapy for Wilms tumor – and it remains so today. Used with a second drug, vincristine, to shrink tumors prior to or after surgery, dactinomycin has helped boost cure rates for the disease to 90 percent.
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- Seizing the moment: Introduction | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s and the future
