Word: bcg
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...been trying, with some success, to awaken sleeping immune systems to combat cancer. The techniques of this approach vary widely. Some doctors still use Coley's bacterial-toxin formula; others inject vaccine made from killed mumps virus and diphtheria bacteria. Many, however, prefer a live-bacteria tuberculosis vaccine called BCG (for Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, after the Frenchmen who developed...
Memory Jogger. BCG is not an anti-cancer drug as such. But it does appear to be a powerful immunopotentiator, or tool for turning on the immune system. When injected into patients with either natural or acquired immunity to tuberculosis, it jogs their immunological "memory" of the disease and produces a generalized immune response. Injected directly into cancer lesions, it can cause a responsive immune system to send anti-tuberculosis antibodies to the scene to fight the invaders. In some patients, this defense against bacterial attackers destroys cancer cells as well...
Several doctors are now using BCG for cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Donald Morton of U.C.L.A. has used BCG to hype up the immune systems of patients suffering from malignant melanoma, a cancer that first appears on the skin and spreads rapidly to other parts of the body; some of his patients have been free of the disease for two years or more...
...Georges Mathé, a leading cancer researcher at the Paul Brousse Hospital at Villejuif, near Paris, has been using BCG since 1964. He administers it as part of a double-barreled approach to treating patients with acute lymphoid leukemia, a cancer of the blood-forming tissues that tends to further depress and obliterate the patient's already weakened immune responses. Mathé begins with chemotherapy, using cell-destroying drugs that kill rapidly proliferating cells (and thus destroy cancer cells more quickly than normal ones) to reduce the size of cancers from billions of cells to 100,000 or so. Then he uses...
...Japan, tuberculosis researchers have developed a form of BCG vaccine that resists tropical heat. In a major test in Madras, WHO teams are treating TB victims with isoniazid (TIME, March 2, 1962) and are searching for another, equally inexpensive drug to combine with isoniazid to keep down resistant bacilli...