Wreaking such havoc on the body is impossible without the help of local capillaries, the Harvard group found. If a tumor is unsuccessful in recruiting nearby blood vessels, it quickly starves, remaining a dormant and harmless lump of renegade cells surrounded by the body's normal cells.

Although a tumor must clear about 15 biological hurdles before metastasis occurs, scientists have become convinced that tripping up the tumor is easiest and most effective at this early stage.

Wonder Drug?

Armed with the theoretical background of how tumors work their way through the body, researchers are now fine-tuning their lab skills in an effort to stop real-live cancers.

Rather than excising the organ which is playing host to the tumor--often a dangerous or impossible procedure--the Harvard researchers found that they could inject a drug to halt the growth of blood vessels near the tumor, thus starving the cancer.

Finding such a drug wasn't easy. In fact, by Ingber's account, the discovery came as a stroke of luck.

"It was serendipity," he says. "We standardly have millions of cells growing, and you have to keep them sterile. This one day, I happened to have a contaminant."

The contaminant turned out to be a fungus which, upon close inspection, had caused nearby cells to become rounded. Such rounding intrigued Ingber, since rounded cells tend to crowd out or stunt the growth of local capillaries.

Scientists aren't sure why cell shape should so adversely affect cell growth. Nonetheless, the discovery was important, since a drug which represses cell growth is precisely what you want to stem a tumor's growth.

Ingber, along with Folkman and their associates, sent the corrupted sample to Japan, where chemists grew the fungus in huge 10,000-liter vats in order to extract the potent compound. The Japanese found the active, capillary-suppressing agent to be the rare fungus fumagillin.

After working for years on finding such a drug, Ingber had uncovered a mother lode--but there was a catch. Fed to rats, large enough doses of fumagillin proved capable of suppressing tumors, but at the same time also caused severe weight loss.

A bit of chemical fiddling was enough to clear up the difficulty. Ingber and his colleagues synthesized from scratch in the laboratory an artificial likeness of fumagillin with all the tumor-suppressing capability, but without the side effects. The drug is known chemically as "AGM-1470."

Together, the Harvard researchers and their Japanese cohorts published their results in the December 6 issue of Nature. Only a couple of months old, the findings have already sparked the hopes of the entire industry of cancer researchers.

"That's real hot information," says Weidner. If such a drug turns out to be as effective as preliminary tests have indicated, he adds, "it would be really exciting."

From Research to Therapy?