Chemotherapy and radiation failed to thwart Erika Hurwitz’s rare cancer of white blood cells. So her doctors offered her another option, a drug for melanoma. The result was astonishing.
Within four weeks, a red rash covering her body, so painful she had required a narcotic patch and the painkiller OxyContin, had vanished. Her cancer was undetectable.
“It has been a miracle drug,” said Mrs. Hurwitz, 78, of Westchester County.
She is part of a new national effort to try to treat cancer, not based on what organ it started in, but on what mutations drive its growth.
Cancers often tend to be fueled by changes in genes, or mutations, that make cells grow and spread to other parts of the body. There are now an increasing number of drugs that block mutations in cancer genes and can halt a tumor’s growth.
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But others in basket studies have not fared so well.
Eleni Vavas entered a basket study at Memorial Sloan Kettering hoping to stop the stomach cancer that was killing her. The study, said her husband, John Vavas, “was our last-ditch, Hail Mary effort.” His wife, who was 36, entered it last spring, the only patient with stomach cancer. But, Mr. Vavas said, “she just didn’t respond.”
She died on July 1.
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