Sydney Lupkin

This one gets stuck in the on position, leading to uncontrolled white blood cell growth, chronic myeloid leukemia.

Brian was trying to turn that switch off.

So he wanted to find a drug that would inhibit the abnormal enzyme.

That's brilliant.

Yeah.

He said that his institution thought it was an interesting idea for a grant or something.

But he ultimately had to leave his job in Boston and move across the country to Oregon Health and Science University to really actually pursue it.

Yeah.

He's like, this is big science.

I got to take a risk here.

Right.

Was it worth it?

Well, he says that within six weeks of arriving, he was testing five compounds from the drug company that would become Novartis in his lab.

One of them was Gleevec.

It was a compound discovered by scientist Nicholas Leiden, and it worked, at least in the lab.

Yeah, exactly.

And these trials were also unique because they only included patients with this specific kind of leukemia.

Before this trial, cancer drug studies would include patients with all kinds of cancer, and they just sort of hoped,

that the drug worked for some of them.

They would just lump them all together?