The Breakthrough
Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Follow along as this New York Times bestselling author details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleashing the human immune system to fight in this "captivating and heartbreaking" book (The Wall Street Journal).
For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine's most confounding mysteries: Why doesn't our immune system recognize and fight cancer the way it does other diseases, like the common cold?
As it turns out, the answer to that question can be traced to a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses -- tricks that scientists have only recently discovered and learned to defeat. The result is what many are calling cancer's "penicillin moment," a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it.
In The Breakthrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse Charles Graeber guides readers through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of twenty-first-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step -- harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies -- is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease.
Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Hype can be dangerous, just as false hope can be cruel," journalist Graeber (The Good Nurse) writes in this lucid and informed report on how doctors and medical researchers, advancing beyond a "cut, burn, and poison" approach to fighting cancer, discovered how to use the human immune response to attack mutant cells. Graeber recalls the "crushing failure" cancer immunotherapy suffered in the 1970s, and the giddy over-optimism seen in the 1980s before cancer breakthroughs such as interferon drugs went bust and immunotherapy research was left to a "handful of true believers." His narrative moves from the grueling stories of research experiments and drug trials through which pharmaceutical companies "spread their bets" over a variety of potential drugs to the even more grueling experiences of cancer patients. Graeber focuses on the scientific developments and the "mind-blowing possibilities," such as cellular therapy, in which living cells are used to fight cancer. Noting there are 940 immunotherapeutic drugs being tested by more than a half million patients, with another 1,064 drugs in the preclinical stage, he predicts the cancer cure lies in the personalized immunotherapy route. Graeber gives readers a basis for both understanding the challenges involved and for cautious optimism that a cure can be found.)
