Lost in Translation

She was dying. Diagnosed with invasive colon cancer at age 41 and having undergone many unsuccessful interventions, Mrs. B, a police dispatcher and mother of two, came to us with hopes that an experimental therapy might find her cancer's Achilles' heel. I was 23. I had just finished my first year of medical school and landed a summer gig on a clinical trials team at a prestigious cancer center. My previous research occurred entirely in the laboratory, where cancer existed only through the lens of a microscope or the label "Ca" on a test tube. But now, cancer had a face. If she met all of the criteria, Mrs. B would be the 11th and final person enrolled on this arm of the trial before it closed. Prior to meeting Mrs. B, I had spent months studying the pathogenesis of disease during the first year of medical school. The clinical encounters that I had were focused on eliciting a proper medical history and being able to interpret and articulate a patient's narrative. All of this made me a good fit for the summer job on the clinical research team. Cancer patients who had exhausted other treatment options would reach out to us, inquiring about joining the investigational protocol. When their paperwork and tissue specimens arrived in the mail, I would review their records, helping my boss evaluate if they met the trial's parameters. A trip down to the pathology lab would allow me to analyze their biopsy samples for over-expression of a protein called HER2/neu, the unifying targ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news