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Eight years ago, Adrienne Boire had a conversation with a patient that would set the course of her research. Back then, she was dividing her time between her postdoctoral research in a lab studying metastasis at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and treating patients there as part of a clinical fellowship. The patient, like Boire, was in her 30s, and she had recently been diagnosed with a condition called leptomeningeal metastasis, in which cancer cells invade the spinal fluid, causing death within a few months. “She asked me deceptively simple questions,” Boire remembers, “like, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why did my cancer go into the spinal fluid? How did it get there?’ . . . And, obviously, ‘What can we do to stop this?’” Boire didn’t have good answers. “And then she said, ‘I really hope somebody will study this someday.’”
Boire agreed with ...
