Cancer pioneers

Dana-Farber caregivers and patients have made healthcare inroads over the past 60 years
By Debra Ruder

Two-time cancer survivor Candy Oyler and one of her original Jimmy Fund Clinic doctors, Allen Goorin

Certain shades of pink and yellow still make Candy Oyler cringe. More than 30 years ago, she took powerful, experimental chemotherapy drugs in those colors to rid her young body of bone cancer. "I was 14, and I didn't know anything about cancer," recalls Oyler, who was treated in Dana-Farber's Jimmy Fund Clinic and Children's Hospital Boston. "Back then, people didn't say cancer; they said 'the C word.'"

Not only was part of her right leg amputated, she received weeklong drug infusions in the hospital and clinic, vomited regularly, went temporarily bald, and had intensive X-rays to determine whether her cancer had spread. "They used to put a blood pressure cuff on my head so the [drug] vincristine wouldn't go to my brain," she recalls. "They told me I had a 10 percent chance of survival – well, they filtered that news through my parents."

Now in her mid-40s and living a full life in Western Massachusetts, Oyler has faced some long-term effects of her cancer care – most notably heart disease caused by the medicine doxorubicin. A few years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer (its cause unclear) and had a mastectomy to remove it.

Unlike in the 1970s, this time around cancer was discussed openly, and Oyler had many more options and decisions to make about her care, including whether to undergo genetic testing for a cancer-related mutation, which she was relieved to learn she did not have. "Today the doctors look more at your quality of life," she says. "When I was 14, they were focused on removing the cancer."

In many ways, Oyler's experience mirrors the spectacular changes that have occurred in oncology since Sidney Farber, MD, established the Children's Cancer Research Foundation (now Dana-Farber) 60 years ago. Credit for this progress goes to ever-expanding knowledge about the biology of cancer cells, efforts to minimize side effects, and awareness of the long-term health consequences of treatments – not to mention the technology advances that have boosted safety and survival rates for both children and adults with cancer.

As Institute President Emeritus David G. Nathan, MD, notes in his 2007 book, The Cancer Treatment Revolution, Dana-Farber caregivers and scientists have played key roles in this dramatic unfolding, as have patients enrolled in clinical studies here.