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Signs of hope: in Folkman's laboratory, the lung cancer tumour visible (left) was reduced after 12 days' endostatin therapy (right) Credit: NATURE

The presentation of a US newspaper story about innovative cancer research was last week criticized by cancer specialists, science-media watchers and biotechnology investors. They said the New York Times raised patients' hopes unrealistically and sent the stock market into a frenzy that was bad for both investors and industry.

“You have to think twice before you put a story above the fold on the front page about a drug and use the word cure when it really doesn't even exist in drug form today,” says David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

“People who should know better simply [got] involved in the hype. I would not exclude even members of the top echelons of the National Institutes of Health,” says Spyros Andreaopoulos, director emeritus of the office of communications at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, California, who has written widely on the interplay of science and the media.

The article, which ran on 3 May in the widely-read Sunday edition under the headline ‘A Cautious Awe Greets Drugs That Eradicate Tumors in Mice’, featured enthusiastic quotations from Nobel prizewinner James Watson and Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute. It described the work of Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher at the Children's Hospital in Boston, in whose laboratory the substances endostatin and angiostatin were discovered.

These natural substances work by choking the blood supply of cancers, and Folkman has said that in combination they eradicate all kinds of tumours in mice without inducing resistance or obvious side-effects.

Watson was quoted as saying that “Judah is going to cure cancer in two years”. The article also quotes Klausner calling the drugs “the single most exciting thing on the horizon” for cancer treatment, and adding “I am putting nothing on higher priority than getting this into clinical trials”.

Since the publication, both have modified their statements, or at least the story's presentation of them. The optimistic tone and prominent placement of the story — the top of the front page — sparked controversy.

Biotechnology investors pointed out that it ignored other important contexts, such as that a dozen or more laboratories are working on compounds that also seek to inhibit blood supply to tumours, and that many are further along in their research.

“There are 20 other companies with antiangiogenesis programmes. And most of them are more advanced really,” says Stelios Papadopoulos, a biophysicist who is an investment banker specializing in biotechnology at PaineWebber in New York.

Cancer physicians complained they were flooded with calls from patients demanding the substances, which are not yet produced in sufficient quantities to launch human clinical trials and are thus years from availability, even if they surmount the hurdles.

Allen Lichter, a radiation oncologist at the University of Michigan who takes over as president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology at the annual meeting this coming weekend, says that the article was “cruel” in “inappropriately” raising hopes about a treatment that may never translate successfully from mice to men. “It builds cynicism that what people read about cancer research cannot be relied upon. That will accrue to our detriment over time,” Lichter says.

But Nancy Nielsen, a spokeswoman for the New York Times, defends the handling of the story, arguing that the quotation from Watson made it “distinctive” and that the article described “an optimistic trend becoming apparent in scientists' thinking about a variety of recent lab developments”.

At least one prominent scientist agreed. The molecular biologist and 1959 Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg, of Stanford University, says that the story deserved its front-page slot. “Something newsworthy has been found,” Kornberg said, although he added he would have preferred the story to have been “a little more cautionary”.

Watson and Klausner later toned down their remarks. Watson, in a letter to the newspaper published on 7 May, said “my recollection of the conversation [with the New York Times reporter] is quite different”. But in the letter, he calls the work “the most exciting cancer research of my lifetime”.

Wendy Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where Watson is president, said Watson was contesting the quotation attributed to him “because he feels a statement from him has offered what could very well prove to be false hope to a great many people”.

The New York Times says it stands by the Watson quotation. But on 8 May it admitted it had imprecisely paraphrased Klausner by using the words “The National Cancer Institute has made the drugs their top priority” to describe his statement “I am putting nothing on higher priority”.

In the Los Angeles Times of 6 May, Klausner — who could not be reached later last week — sounded a cautionary note, saying “We have cured mice of cancer for decades — and it simply didn't work in humans.”

Scientists argued last week that nothing in the New York Times story was news to those in the field. Folkman's early results with one of the substances, endostatin, in a particular mouse lung cancer were published in Nature last November (see 390, 404; 1997), and he has discussed results with both substances in scientific meetings for 18 months.

Nevertheless, the day after the news story appeared, shares in Entremed, the small company in Rockville, Maryland, founded to make the drugs, soared from $12.06 to more than $80 before closing at $51.81. (They fell back to $33.25 by the end of the week.)

Two other biotechnology companies Sugen and Magainin Pharmaceuticals also saw their share prices rise by 20 per cent and 38 per cent respectively. Both are working with similar compounds — known as angiogenesis inhibitors because they stop the growth of new blood vessels. But these compounds are already in human trials.

Biotechnology investors complain that the stock market's reaction damaged the industry. “It dilutes the impact of future more definitive work by this company or others, and results in a potential misallocation of capital away from more proven treatments,” says one New York investment banker, who calls the story “a bad thing for science and for biotechnology”.

Experienced investors said the market's reaction — 23.5 million shares of Entremed were traded the day after the story was published — was driven by ordinary investors who engaged in momentum buying, in which people hurriedly buy a stock thinking that it may never be as cheap again.

Entremed's experience clearly stimulated some scientists into thinking about ventures of their own. David Nance, president and chief executive officer of Introgen Therapeutics, a company in Austin, Texas, that funds biotechnology start-ups, says that in conversations last week with researchers, all wanted to know: “If we go public fast, and publish this animal data showing this, is it worth a billion dollars these days?”

He told them “don't be ridiculous”. Perhaps, he says, “if they were Nobel candidates and had reputations like Dr Folkman, maybe this would happen again in history. But don't count on it.”