Sea squirts . . .

The cancer treatment community is abuzz about a new drug that has some interesting characteristics: it is the first drug to demonstrate a clear effectiveness in the treatment of soft-tissue sarcomas, but it only works against a single subtype of this kind of cancer. Treated solely with the drug, four percent of the patients saw their tumors completely disappear. After six months, nearly 90% of those treated had not seen their tumors grow, and the median period before the tumors started to grow again was 14 months - a great improvement on other treatment outcomes.
This discovery has not set the world on fire because soft-tissue sarcoma is a rare form of cancer, and the subtype that it has proven effective against represents just 10% of those cases. (The particular cancer subtype has an annual incidence rate of only about 1 case per million population.) But cancer doctors have taken notice because its narrow effectiveness demonstrates that tumor histology matters, i.e., different tumor histologies, even within the same class of tumor, are responsive to different drugs, so maybe it’s time to stop trying to apply a “one size fits all” approach.

The drug, called Trabectedin, is derived from the sea squirt, a weird little creature that begins life as a swimming larva with a backbone, a brain, a balancing organ, and an eye. After swimming around for awhile it finds a suitable place to land and attaches itself, never to move again. The adult form has no backbone, no brain, no eye, and no balancing organ. It is, however, beautiful.

This handsome couple look like Japanese game show versions of Easter Island statues.

Here’s another one that looks like Barney.

The drug is apparently well tolerated, causing some nausea but no hair loss.

But why blog about this oddball creature from which a drug is derived that has an exceedingly narrow focus? The one-in-a-million subtype of cancer that it has demonstrated exclusive effectiveness against is called myxoid liposarcoma. The same type of tumor I had the prior two episodes. And while we do not yet know what I have this time around, I’m happy these little sea squirts have shown such an interest in myxoid liposarcomas . . .