Siddhartha mukherjee aria mukherjee

There the family vacations in a beach house designed and owned by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, a close friend. It was a moment of epiphany for Mukherjee. A therapy that could somehow shield healthy human cells from the toxicities of cancer drugs would, he knew, revolutionize treatment for many forms of the disease. The idea was at once elementary and elegant; Mukherjee was immediately consumed by its promise.

The problem with most cancer drugs, as Mukherjee explains in his Pulitzer Prize—winning history of the disease, The Emperor of All Maladies , is that they are lousy at distinguishing between cancer cells and healthy cells. This is because cancer cells are genetically, metabolically, and structurally very similar to normal ones. Traditional chemotherapy drugs, which still form the backbone of most cancer-treatment regimens, are designed to combat cancer cells by turning one of their most frightening and unusual characteristics — their tendency to proliferate very quickly — into a vulnerability.

The drugs work by weakening the mechanisms that all cells in the body use to divide and duplicate, thus ensuring that any cells that frequently make copies of themselves eventually perish when they try to reproduce. But some healthy tissues, like those of the bone marrow, skin, guts, and hair follicles, are also constantly renewing themselves, and so cells in these parts of the body are damaged by chemotherapy too.

Dr mukherjee

Mukherjee is all too familiar with the toxic side effects of chemotherapy. Having treated blood cancers for nearly two decades, he has on countless occasions endured what is for any physician a soul-crushing experience: watching a patient suffer terribly at his own hands, as the result of treatments he has administered. This is, in fact, precisely what his job as an oncologist requires.

In fact, the amount of chemotherapy given to a patient is typically limited by the amount of stress the bone marrow can withstand. Cancer experts, frustrated by the scattershot approach and physical toll of chemotherapy, have long sought new regimens. And in the s, as geneticists were mapping the human genome and decoding the specific DNA of cancers, they started to design drugs that zero in on tumors more precisely.