SUZANNE TOPALIAN：癌症斗士
一个坚信免疫疗法的临床医生，是的，她是对的。
作者 Heidi Ledford
Chris Maddaloni
When Suzanne Topalian heard in July that a therapy she had helped to pioneer could now be prescribed to treat people with advanced melanoma, she greeted the news with excitement, but also characteristic resolve. The meticulous cancer researcher and physician
was already focused on the field‘s next challenges: approval for the drug in other countries and against a wider range of cancers. “Although this was reason to celebrate, we‘re still looking towards the horizon,” she says.
当Suzanne Topalian在六月份听到这个治疗方法时候，她已经在这个方面做了很多开拓工作帮助治疗黑色素瘤的病人。听到这个消息她很兴奋。癌症的研究人员和科学家已经开始把重点放在下一个挑战：为世界的其他国提供必要的药物以治疗更大范围内的癌症。她说，尽管这个理由值得庆祝，但是我们仍然在探索着。
The drug in question is part of a hot new class called PD-1 inhibitors, which allow T cells in the immune system to jump into high gear so that they are free to attack tumours. This July, Japanese regulators approved the first such drug — nivolumab, made by
Bristol-Myers Squibb of New York — largely on the back of clinical trials that Topalian led. Two months later, the US Food and Drug Administration approved another, called pembrolizumab. Some analysts predict that the drugs will become a cornerstone of cancer
treatment, with a market exceeding US$10 billion by 2020.
药物问题关键在于一种很热门的药物叫做 PD-1的抑制剂，他允许T细胞在免疫系统中能工作在更高级的层面使得他们能够自由地攻击肿瘤细胞。今年六月，日本的首次证明了这种药物nivolumab，由纽约的Bristol-Myers Squibb在Topalian带领下研制成功。两个月后，美国的食品药物管理局证明了另外一种药物，叫做pembrolizumab。一些分析人员预测，这种药物在未来将会成为治疗癌症的核心，到了2020年将会有高达100亿美元的市场。
Even as a medical student, Topalian says, she was hooked by the idea of turning the body‘s own defences against cancer rather than — as most other therapies do — attacking a tumour directly with radiation or drugs. In 1985, she joined the lab of tumour immunologist
Steven Rosenberg at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. She intended to leave after 2 years; instead, she stayed for 21 and set up her own lab. Rosenberg says that Topalian quickly made her mark as a talented, careful scientist who always
kept the big picture in mind. “She was totally passionate about finding effective cancer treatments,” he says.
在Topalian还是学生的时候她就说过，她希望利用人体自身的免疫系统来抵抗癌细胞而不是其他的理论的做法，直接用药物或者辐射来杀死癌细胞。在1985年，她加入了美国马里兰州Steven Rosenberg国家癌症研究中心，她原本打算在那个实验室待两年，但是后来她在那里工作了21年并且建立了自己的实验室。Rosenberg说Topalian用实际行动证明了她是一个有天赋，细心有理想的科学及，她对癌症的研究抱有极大的热情。
Even when sceptics doubted that cancer immunotherapy would work, and early clinical trials looked disappointing, Topalian was undeterred. “There would always be some patients who responded to those treatments,” she says. “It was those exceptional responders
who kept hope alive.”
当质疑者怀疑免疫疗法治疗癌症，临床试验没有进展的时候，Topalian还是风雨无阻，她说，肯定会有病人对这些治疗有反应，正是那些依旧抱着希望的病人。
In 2006, Topalian left Bethesda to help to launch trials of nivolumab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. That work led to a landmark publication in 2012 showing that nivolumab produced dramatic responses not only in some people with advanced
melanoma but also in those with lung cancer — the world‘s most common cause of cancer death (S. L. Topalian?et al.?N. Engl. J. Med.?366,?2443–2454; 2012). Regulators are now considering approval of the drugs for treatment of lung cancer.
2006Topalian离开Bethesda在马里兰的Johns Hopkins开始了一项试验，工作在2012年取得了瞩目的进展，试验表明nivolumab不仅在黑色素瘤的病人中有疗效，在肺癌中也有疗效，其中肺癌是世界上患者最多的癌症。实验人员正在考虑将这种药物用于癌症的治疗。
Other researchers are pouring into the field, spurred by successes with PD-1 inhibitors and other cancer immunotherapies, says Jedd Wolchok, an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “It‘s legitimized a field that was once scorned,”
he says.
