Sydney Lupkin

Then, after an MRI showed what was going on with his bone marrow, he was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, a kind of blood cancer.

He was 37 at the time and had a five-year-old daughter at home.

The doctors told him he had three years to live.

So after his diagnosis in January 1995, Mel starts doing bone marrow drives, hoping to find a match and get a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

But at the time, if you were Black, you had such a low chance of finding a match that he knew it was kind of an impossibility.

But after all this searching, Mel added thousands of people to the registry, but he didn't find a match for himself.

So he started participating in clinical trials for experimental treatments still in development.

They would work for a few months and then stop.

He outlived his expiration date, but wasn't doing well.

And there was another one, Gleevec, though, of course, it was still being studied and didn't have that name yet.

Mel started the drug in August of 1998.

By the next June, Emily, he was running a marathon in Anchorage, Alaska.

Yeah, so it kind of starts with a setback.

Oncologist Brian Druker had this idea that at the time was really new in cancer medicine.

He thought, what if instead of just trying to kill cancer cells and hoping that the healthy cells were mostly spared, you could target the reason that cancer cells were growing out of control in the first place?

We didn't because we didn't know what to target.

There was a lot we didn't understand about cancers.

And we learned it in chronic myeloid leukemia, which became one of the first cancers to be linked to a genetic abnormality, the Philadelphia chromosome.

Scientists knew that people with this chromosome had a fused gene.

That gene results in an abnormal enzyme that regulates one of the on-off switches for certain cell growth.