Beating the bane of so many cancer patients.

• Position: Fibrosis

Cancer behaves like a wound that never mends, constantly drawing on the body's injury-repair response to thrive and grow. "Fibrosis is wound-healing that never stops. The body thinks an injury exists when it doesn't, so it just keeps going, producing scars that clog an organ's system and destroy its functional tissue until it fails," relates Raghu Kalluri, chair of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center's Department of Cancer Biology, Houston.

"Fibrosis is almost a tumor-like growth minus the cancer cells." Most solid tumors are 75-95% fibrotic material. Not only is fibrosis a known risk factor for cancer development, it is an accomplished, albeit less famous, killer in its own right, Kalluri notes.

"Cirrhosis of the liver is nothing but fibrosis. In diabetes, 40% of all deaths are caused by kidney failure from fibrosis, which also is the leading cause of death from lupus. Pulmonary fibrosis is incurable. Scleroderma, hardening of the skin, also is fibrotic disease. Put them all together and you have a major disease area that probably affects half a billion people worldwide. Developing a drug specific to fibrosis would...