Roxanne KhamsiIn 2016, doctors invited Eileen Kapotes to join a clinical trial for a drug that had never been used for her disease.
Kapotes, a first grade teacher in her 50s, was fighting an aggressive breast cancer that had spread through her body. She had endured grueling treatments over the previous 4 years, including whole-brain radiation therapy.
She had also been taking the breast cancer medication Herceptin, but her tumors were still growing. Now, she had a chance to try something radically different: a drug called ruxolitinib, originally designed to treat cancers affecting the blood and bone marrow.Kapotes’s oncologist, Amy Tiersten at Mount Sinai Hospital, was stunned by how well her patient responded to the new drug.