未来目标 攻克五种癌症

A family business

Dr DePinho himself will have more duties at MD Anderson than just dealing with the five chosen tumours. The donkey work of creating the Institute for Applied Cancer Science, as the new mission control is to be known, will be done by Lynda Chin. Dr Chin, too, worked at the Belfer Institute. She is part of the International Scientific Steering Committee of the cancer-genome project. And she is also Dr DePinho's wife. Dr Chin will be assisted by some 55 other scientists from the Belfer, who are making the journey to Texas with her and her husband. That sort of team poaching is common in investment banking but rarer in academic research. Dr DePinho refers to it, jokingly, as metastasis, since a clone of his primary creation will be taking root elsewhere in the country.

夫妻店生意

德平厚博士在MD安德森的作用远不止确定哪五种肿瘤。建立肿瘤应用科学研究所（这是新的目标控制机构的名称）的艰苦工作是琳达．秦的责任，她也曾在贝尔佛研究所工作。她还是癌症图谱项目的国际科学指导委员会的成员，并且是德平厚博士的妻子。55名科学工作者将和德平厚夫妇一起从贝尔福来到德克萨斯，帮助秦博士工作。这种挖走人家整个团队的做法在投资银行界司空见惯，但是在学术研究界却不多见。德平厚博士把此事戏称为“细胞转移”，因为他原先创造的研究机构的克隆物将在另一个地方扎下根来。

As to which five cancers to attack, that decision will be made by the middle of 2012. A crucial consideration will be how likely it looks that research into the tumour in question could get rapidly to the "proof of concept" stage—the point at which it could be taken forward by a business that relied on commercial sources of capital, rather than on the sorts of grants that usually propel academic research. At that moment a new firm might be spun out of the institute, or a deal might be done with an established pharmaceutical firm, to try to get a new drug developed.

至于把哪五种癌症作为目标，将在2012年年中决定。一个关键因素是看对目标癌症的研究是否能尽快达到“概念验证”的阶段，到了那个阶段，研究工作就可以在商业资本的支持下作为一个生意来向前推进，而不是仅仅是依靠科研拨款。这样，或者可以在研究所的基础上成立一个新公司，或者可以和既有的制药公司合作，从而研发一种新药。

In recent years many big drug companies have gutted their research departments. This is partly because those departments have failed to come up with new "blockbuster" drugs of the sort that created Big Pharma in the first place, and partly because the big firms' bosses had hoped that smaller biotechnology companies, of the sort Dr DePinho has helped set up, would do the hard work of drug discovery instead, and then let themselves be bought by the big firms.

最近这些年来，很多大制药公司取消了他们的研究部。部分原因是，这些研究部没能研制出当初做大这些大制药公司的拳头产品那种量级的新产品，部分原因是，那些大制药公司的老板们希望德平厚博士那样的小生物技术公司承担发明新药的艰巨工作，然后再把这些小公司收购进来。

Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out like that. The output of the biotech firms has been a trickle, rather than a torrent. They have been one of the worst-performing parts of the private-equity market since 2007, according to Dr DePinho. He hopes to change that—and in the matter of new anti-cancer drugs, the science is looking auspicious. For example, a drug called vemurafenib, which was approved for use in America in August 2011, gives months of extra life to people with metastasising melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers. Vemurafenib is so powerful that some people call it a "Lazarus" drug, after the chap Jesus is said to have raised from the dead.

令人失望的是，事情并没有像他们设想的那样发展。生物技术公司只有一些点滴的成果，没有产生什么大的成果。德平厚博士指出，自2007年以来，这个领域是私募股份市场上表现最差的领域之一。他希望改变这个局面。而研制抗癌新药的科技看来正处于幸运期。例如，2011年8月，美国批准了一种名为vemurafenib的新药，它可以把最恶性的癌症之一黑色素瘤病人的生命延长数月。这种药的效力是如此显著，以致一些人把它称为“拉扎罗斯”—— 那个被耶稣起死回生的麻风病人的名字。

Crucially for Dr DePinho's project, the development of vemurafenib was stimulated by the identification of a mutated gene often present in melanomas. He and others like him hope that the cancer-genome consortium will throw up dozens of similar genes, and that they, too, will prove tractable targets for drug development.

对德平厚博士很有意义的是，vemurafenib的研发正是由于辨识了经常出现在黑色素瘤中的一种突变基因所推动的。德平厚和同行们希望癌症基因图谱研究联盟能够发现几十种类似的基因，从而能够为新药研发提供可控的目标。

Of course, if Dr DePinho had a penny for every time a "cure for cancer" headline proved premature, he wouldn't need munificent donors. But if his bets on the science and on adopting business methods pay off, the drug industry and millions of patients will benefit. That would be one benign sort of metastasis.

当然，过去已经有太多关于“攻克癌症”的宣告最终被证明是为时过早。[注]但是，如果德平厚博士的科研选题和运用商业方式的办法能够奏效，制药行业和数百万患者将会受益。那倒真可以称之为一个良性的细胞转移。