Putting Kakaako On The Map

Not only has the work of Dr. Michele Carbone at the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii given the UH facility added esteem, he also brings in $9.8 million a year in grants to pursue his groundbreaking investigations

Wednesday - December 27, 2006
By Chad Pata
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |

Del.icio.us

Dr. Carbone with wife Beth

With all the fuss about the development of Kakaako, most people have missed out on the real developments coming out of the area from the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii.

The recent introduction of cancer pathologist Dr. Michele Carbone, the premier authority on mesothelioma in the country, has brought an influx of esteem and finances to the 40-year-old medical school.

Mesothelioma is a cancer caused by (among other things) exposure to asbestos, a disease that strikes home here in Hawaii because of its incidence among shipyard workers. When Carbone first began studying the disease in 1991, little was known about its causes beyond its link to asbestos.

What he has since uncovered is that genetics and a government-mandated vaccine from the 1950s and ‘60s can greatly increase your odds of contracting mesothelioma. The former has led Carbone to successfully advise governments to move entire villages of people, while the latter discovery is leading to billions of dollars in lawsuits.

His first breakthrough came while working at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. He had been studying SV40, a potent monkey tumor virus, and discovered something he had not expected.

Dr. Michele Carbone’s research
links polio vaccine and cancer

“While doing these studies in 1991, I found that the virus caused mesothelioma in 60 percent of infected hamsters,” says Carbone, who now commands 90 percent of the grant money dedicated to studying mesothelioma. “I was surprised, because as far as I knew mesothelioma had only been linked to asbestos.

“So I started to study the issue, and I found out that there were many things we did not know about mesothelioma, for example, why among people exposed to asbestos only a tiny fraction develop disease and most do not, the fact that at least 20 percent of mesotheliomas develop in people that have not been exposed to asbestos, and so on.”

Prior to the 1950s, the reports of mesothelioma were so rare that many scientists doubted its existence - this despite asbestos having been used in the United States dating back to the turn of the last century.

“I also found out that humans had massively been exposed to SV40 in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s through contaminated polio vaccines,” says Carbone, “and that the enormous increase in the incidence of mesothelioma from about zero in 1950 to 2,000 to 3,000 deaths per year presently had occurred after people were exposed to SV40.”

SV40 got into the vaccine most baby boomers took because the vaccine was created in the bodies of slaughtered monkeys. Not every dose contained the virus, but it’s estimated that 10 million to 30 million Americans were exposed. Overseas the numbers range into

Page 1 of 2 pages for this story 1 2 >