精准打击癌症，减少患者痛苦

New drugs, with components that can be repeatedly recombined for the best antitumor effect, are outdoing old-style chemotherapy BY JYOTI MADHUSOODANAN ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY I N THE LONG AND OFTEN DISPIRITING QUEST to cure cancer, the 1998 approval of the drug Herceptin was a tremendously hopeful moment. This drug for breast cancer was the first to use a tumor-specific protein as a homing beacon to find and kill cancer cells. And it worked. Herceptin has benefited millions of people since that time, dramatically increasing the 10-year survival rate—and the can- cer-free rate—for what was once one of the worst medical diagnoses. “Honestly, it was sort of earth-shattering,” says oncologist Sara M. Tolaney of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. …