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Letter From
Joseph Rubinfeld, Ph.D., CEO of SuperGen
We hear
statistics all the time about cancer morbidity and cancer
mortality. We read numbers such as “28,000 persons die
each year in the United States from pancreatic cancer.”
We learn that Michael Landon and Marcello Mastroianni died
from pancreatic cancer. As have many other famous, but mostly
not-so-famous,human beings. Twenty-eight thousand... Just
a number, really. Hard for the mind to put a human face on
such an abstract concept. For those of us who have never endured
the suffering of pancreatic cancer ourselves, and whose loved
ones have also been spared, can we ever really, truly, fathom
what it must be like to be told that you have just four or
five months left to live?
If we
forget about that incomprehensible number, twenty-eight thousand,
for a moment, and instead consider the life of just one single
victim of pancreatic cancer, perhaps we can more readily accept
why “numbers” are not the most important part of
the story behind cancer-fighting drugs.
Consider Mr. Gordon Findlay, for example. Four years ago,
Gordon was given about four months to live. There was no hope,
he recalls. None. Pancreatic cancer is a lethal menace. Indeed,
at the time of his diagnosis, Gordon had a tumor in his pancreas
that was the size of a tennis ball, as he tells it.
Fortunately for Gordon, he learned of Dr. John Stehlin and
the work he was conducting at the nearby Stehlin Foundation
for Cancer Research, in Houston. This wonderful medical institution
was beginning human testing on an extraordinary cancer-fighting
compound we now call Rubitecan.
Miraculously, within just six weeks of Gordon’s taking
Rubitecan - SuperGen’s “pill” for pancreatic
cancer - the deadly tumor had shrunk to the size of “a
golf ball,” Gordon
remembers. “Today,” he tells everyone who will listen,
“all that’s left of that tumor is some scar tissue.
Thank God. Four months have turned into six years now. And
I feel great. It’s really hard for me to believe I came
so close to death.
We at SuperGen, like Dr. Stehlin and others, believe that
Rubitecan is a breakthrough drug because it has shown efficacy
in many other tumors such as cancer of the breast, colon,
and lung, in addition to the pancreas. Rubitecan has also
shown efficacy in blood cancers such as chronic myelomonocytic
leukemia (CMML/ myelodysplastic syndrome).
Annually, there are 28,000 Gordon Findlays with pancreatic
cancer, and hundreds of thousands more with other types of
cancers whose lives could be lengthened or
spared because of Rubitecan. That mission - our mission -
to save the Gordon Findlays of the world from suffering and
dying, is what SuperGen is all about.
Joseph Rubinfeld, Ph.D. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Supergen
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