Desperately Seeking Cures

Despite billions of dollars spent on medical research the number of new treatments and cures is actually decreasing. In this story Newsweek examines the causes the nation's treatment development woes, and identifies novel strategies that are breaking the log-jam. The Chordoma Foundation is putting these strategies to work to accelerate the development of new treatments.

"For instance, the Chordoma Foundation, which supports research into that rare cancer, found that there was only one decent chordoma cell line in the whole world—in a freezer in Germany—and it hadn't been used for new research since 2001. The foundation obtained the legal rights to it and distributed it to some two dozen researchers, jump-starting studies that otherwise would never have been done. The cell line is being used to, among other things, screen existing drugs to see if they might work against chordoma."