Accident led to cancer treatment for 'Philadelphia chromosome'

In 2005, Ryan Corbi was a senior at Villanova, pondering whether to pursue a career in medicine or theology when his doctor told him she suspected he had leukemia.

He felt fine, but some routine blood work looked suspicious. He soon found himself at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where doctors took a sample of his bone marrow and tested it for something he'd never heard of at the time - the Philadelphia chromosome.

Now he's intimately familiar with this bit of errant genetic material that triggers his particular form of the disease - chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Tuesday, at a symposium devoted to the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome, the tall, healthy-looking 27-year-old said he owed his life to a decades-long scientific odyssey that began here in 1958.

It started with a mistake. University of Pennsylvania pathologist Peter Nowell accidentally used tap water rather than a special solution to rinse some slides coated with leukemia cells.

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Author: Faye Flam