Mel Mann, Patient Advocate, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Survivor, shared on X:
“Sidney Farber: The Pathologist Who Started Chemotherapy․
Boston, 1947. Children with acute leukemia almost always died within months.
Doctors could ease pain but could not stop the disease. A pathologist at Children’s Hospital decided to try something no one had tried before.
Farber was born in Buffalo, New York, on September 30, 1903.
He earned his medical degree at Harvard in 1927 and trained in pathology in Germany and Boston.
By the 1940s he was a pathologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, studying the blood of children with leukemia.
In 1947 he began giving a folic-acid antagonist called aminopterin to children whose leukemia had not responded to anything else.
Of the first 16 patients, 10 showed temporary remissions. White blood cell counts fell, spleens shrank, and some children went home.
In 1948 he published the results – the first clear evidence that a chemical could produce remissions in a human cancer.
The remissions were short. Most children relapsed. But the proof was there: cancer could be treated with a drug.
Farber kept pushing. He helped create the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, which later became the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
He died on March 30, 1973, at age 69.
He did not cure childhood leukemia. He proved it could be treated.
Photo: National Cancer Institute/NIH (public domain)․
Education only – not medical advice.”
Other articles from Mel Mann on OncoDaily.