By AMY ADAMS

Although cancers are all lumped under a single word, each person's disease has its own set of molecular defects and reacts in unique ways to the many cancer drugs. It's this wide range of defects that cancer researchers are now hoping to target in newer, more person-specific cancer therapies.

At the April 30 annual Beckman Center Symposium on cancer at the medical school, researchers from across the country discussed new drugs that home in on each cancer's unique glitch and new ways of both preventing and treating the disease.

Many of these drugs, such as the highly effective Gleevec released in 2001, came into being thanks to a clear idea of how cancerous cells differ from their normal neighbors. This distinction helps the drug specifically kill cancer cells with fewer damaging side effects in normal tissue.

This work has been revolutionized with the advent of the DNA microarray, developed in part by Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, professor of biochemistry. DNA microarrays provide a snapshot of which genes a cell or tissue has activated at any given time. "It captures the characteristic personality of that tissue," Brown said during a talk at the symposium.

Stanton Glantz (left) and Lee Hartwell lead a breakout session outside Fairchild Auditorium during this year's daylong Beckman Center Symposium. All presentations focused on some aspect of cancer with an emphasis on methods for customizing treatment to meet the needs of individual patients. Photo: Belinda Byrne

In many cases, that personality involves proteins made exclusively by cancerous cells. Knowing which molecules set cancer cells apart means companies can now develop drugs that specifically block these cancer-enabling proteins.

According to Brown, microarrays have pointed out similarities as well as differences -- it turns out cancer cells have a lot in common with cells recovering from a wound. In both cases normal, adult cells that have stopped dividing revert to a state where they divide rapidly.

In wound healing, that process ends when the skin reforms its smooth covering whereas cancer cells continue their uncontrolled divisions. Brown said that learning how wound repair is normally regulated could lead to new ways of blocking division in cancer cells.

In keeping with this idea, Elaine Fuchs, PhD, the Rebecca C. Lancefield professor of mammalian cell biology and development at Rockefeller University, discussed her work with the skin stem cells that divide and produce new skin after an injury. Many of the same molecules that inspire skin stem cells to divide also play a role in maintaining division in cancer cells. "Understanding these signals could lead to new ways of treating cancer," Fuchs said during her talk.

Better than treating cancer, Stanton Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UC-San Francisco, argued that more attention should be paid to preventing the disease before it starts, particularly in cancers caused by smoking. "You have a lot of smart people trying to cause the disease," he said. "It's like mosquitoes hiring a PR firm to spread malaria."

Glantz argued that all medical schools should refuse tobacco money, even if it goes toward developing cancer cures. He has advocated for programs that prevent young people from taking their first puff and helping smokers quit the habit. California has seen a steady decline in smoking and in lung cancer while these programs have been in place.

If the disease can't be prevented entirely, Lee Hartwell, MD, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, said it should at least be caught early. He said many cancers have a high cure rate if they are treated at an early stage.

"Our current ability to detect cancers is limited, but it is improving rapidly," he said. Many ways of detecting cancer are either intrusive, such as a colonoscopy or mammogram, or require removing tissue after cancer is suspected. He said more money should be spent developing blood tests to detect molecules associated with cancer.

"I think this requires a systematic effort to apply the knowledge we have to the problem of early detection," he said.

This effort to detect cancers early combined with better, more personalized drugs may eventually make cancer a manageable disease rather than a deadly one.