Crazy Sexy Cancer

I want to recommend a documentary I saw last week but unfortunately it's not scheduled to air again unless people email and pester TLC/Discovery.

Either way, it's called Crazy Sexy Cancer and it's about Kris Carr, a 31 y/o woman who was diagnosed with 24 inoperable tumors in her liver. You can learn more about her here and she even has a book if you don't get to see the documentary. (I seem to like recommending things focusing on women who are yoginis.)

In her documentary she highlights other young women with cancer. One of them, Erin Zammett Ruddy, a Glamour magazine editor, really stuck out for me. She has Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) and takes Gleevec. Let me tell you a little story about CML. Warning: this may only be really cool to nerds.

Back in 1960, a translocation between chromosome 9 and 22 was discovered and named the Philadelphia chromosome (so named for it's city of discovery). It was the first chromosomal abnormality found to be linked to cancer. I first learned about it in the really great cytogenetics (chromosome biology) course I took at W&M and of course, I learned about it in numerous courses at UT-Houston HSC MDACC (even the abbreviated version is too long!).

A translocation is where pieces of two chromosome swap places. In this case a gene on 22, called ABL (pronounced "able" and named after a guy named Ableson) gets shoved in next to a gene called BCR (just pronounced bee see arr and stands for breakpoint cluster region) on chromosome 9 resulting in BCR-ABL. This encodes an protein that keeps the switch "ON" for making lots of messed up white blood cells. And all cancer is, really, is uncontrolled cell growth. Only people with the Philadelphia chromosome have this weird BCR-ABL fusion protein and presence of this translocation can give you a diagnosis of CML. It's one of the molecular tests that I do at work! Neat.

Everyone knows that the crappy thing about chemotherapy is that not only does it kill cancer cells, it also kills normal cells, like hair cells. But in the 90's along came Gleevec. Gleevec is a drug, the first of its kind, to specifically target the BCR-ABL protein (It also works on other cancers that have the same sort of ON/OFF switch).

So back to Erin - In the documentary she talks about the extremely sensitive test that determines her diagnosis and about how she takes Gleevec. She has never missed a day of work because of her cancer. THAT IS SO AMAZING. And she even has a new baby!

While I may not be up to finding the cure, when I see stuff like that I'm happy to have a job that is still part of it all.