Lorch sat with Grace and Joe in a cream-colored exam room, a red biohazard box nestled under one counter, and explained that all the standard treatments had been exhausted. He told them about an experimental trial for aggressive thyroid cancers that hadn’t responded to standard treatments, and Grace agreed to enroll. The drug, everolimus, was…
In the years following his breakthrough, Warburg became convinced that the Warburg effect occurs because cells are unable to use oxygen properly and that this damaged respiration is, in effect, the starting point of cancer. Well into the 1950s, this theory — which Warburg believed in until his death in 1970 but never proved —…
Bathed in a nutrient-rich broth suffused with growth factors, the cells will double and redouble in an incubator over the course of the following two weeks, forming a lush outgrowth of malignant cells — cancer abstracted in a dish. A computer, taught to count and evaluate cells, will then determine whether any of the drugs…