Word: citrovorum
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...1960s, doctors devised a new technique. Instead of reducing dosage to decrease toxicity, they increased it. Reasoning that only enormous amounts of the drug could attack bone cancer cells effectively, they began administering potentially lethal doses of methotrexate, following those with an antidote called citrovorum factor, which protects normal cells from methotrexate's deadly action. Since then, massive doses of methotrexate followed by a citrovorum-factor "rescue" (CFR) have become an accepted method of treatment for bone cancer at several cancer centers...
...after amputation. Patients enter the hospital and receive a continuous intravenous infusion of methotrexate for six hours, during which they may be given more than 100 times the standard dose of the drug. Two hours after the methotrexate infusions are completed, the rescue effort begins. The patient is given citrovorum factor, first by injection, then by mouth every six hours for three days, while doctors monitor the patient's condition carefully and check the level of methotrexate in his blood. When it has dropped below the danger point, the patient can go home. He returns to the hospital...
Last week the novel method was under hopeful study in both the U.S. and faraway Africa. The drug Dr. Sullivan and his colleagues chose was Methotrexate, because it has a handy, harmless and effective antagonist in folinic acid, also known as CF, for citrovorum factor. At Memorial and other hospitals, they have tried the combination on a score of patients with cancer confined to the head, where a high concentration of the drug could be infused through a single artery in the neck. In many cases the cancers shrank rapidly, and one man is disease-free after two courses...
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