Acs Research - Theorylab

“To be a scientist,” notes Steve Morris, MD, “you have to take failure after failure with undying enthusiasm.” Without that persistence, we might never have had the lung cancer drug Crizotinib. The path to that drug’s development spanned more than two decades, and Dr. Morris played a critical and recurring role. In 1994, Dr. Morris and his team discovered the gene ALK and showed that it plays a critical role in some lymphomas. He went on to help show that a variety of cancer sub-types are caused by ALK abnormalities, including certain lung cancers, lymphomas, leukemias, mesotheliomas, thyroid cancers, and pediatric cancers. But he didn’t stop with discovery. He and his team also created a diagnostic test, the Vysis ALK Break Apart FISH Probe Kit, to help clinicians determine if a patient’s tumors have an abnormal ALK gene. Ultimately his efforts helped drug developers to come up with the lung cancer drug Xalkori (crizotinib), which was first approved by the FDA in 2011 for the treatment of ALK-positive n