Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs

Rare Oncology

The many different types of rare oncological diseases include tumors of the body and hematological disorders of the blood. Although individually these malignancies are rare, as a group, they represent a significant majority of people with cancer.Certain characteristics of these malignancies differentiate them from more common types of cancer. Often, the cancer begins in a type of cell that only rarely becomes cancerous. This can happen in organs that are otherwise common sites of cancer growth. For example, although breast cancer is not a rare disease, angiosarcoma of the breast, which arises in the inner lining of blood vessels, is a rare cancer.