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The Breakthrough
- Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer
- Narrated by: Will Collyer, Charles Graeber
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
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The Breakthrough
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Publisher's Summary
Follow along as this New York Times best-selling author details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleashing the human immune system to fight in this "captivating and heartbreaking" book (The Wall Street Journal).
For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine's most confounding mysteries: Why doesn't our immune system recognize and fight cancer the way it does other diseases, like the common cold?
As it turns out, the answer to that question can be traced to a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses - tricks that scientists have only recently discovered and learned to defeat. The result is what many are calling cancer's "penicillin moment", a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it.
In The Breakthrough, New York Times best-selling author of The Good Nurse Charles Graeber guides listeners through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of 21st-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step - harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies - is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease.
Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
What the critics say
"Graeber concisely reviews the science of cancer...The risks of tinkering with an intricate immune system are obviously high, even perilous. But the potential reward is a cure. Exciting reading." (Booklist)
"There is no villain more ruthless than cancer, which has robbed us all of loved ones who had to endure untold suffering before they succumbed. But after decades of frustration and toil, scientists finally understand how to vanquish the disease by activating the human body's natural defenses. The intimate stories behind this triumph lie at the heart of Charles Graeber's The Breakthrough, an expertly crafted and exhilarating account of life-saving ingenuity at its most dazzling. You will never encounter another book so incisive about the art of medical sleuthing, or so poetic about our innate drive to hold on to all that's beautiful in this world for as long as we can." (Brendan I. Koerner, Wired contributing editor and author of The Skies Belong to Us)
"[A] deft, detailed study of cancer immunotherapy.... From the once-discredited pioneer William Coley to immunologist and Nobel laureate James P. Allison, they form a brilliant, driven, admirably stubborn group that Graeber brings vividly to life." (Nature)