Word: interferon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, researchers now had enough interferon to move studies out of the laboratory and into the clinic. In 1972 Virologist Thomas Merigan, of Stanford University, and a group of British researchers began studying IF's effect on the common cold. Soviet doctors were claiming success in warding off respiratory infections with weak sprays of IF made in a Moscow laboratory. Merigan and his colleagues gave 16 volunteers a nasal spray of interferon one day before and three days after they were exposed to common cold viruses. Another 16 volunteers were subjected to the same viruses without any protection. The results...
...small band of interferon researchers were able to produce or get their hands on enough interferon to analyze its nature, but the stuff was far too scarce or any significant tests on humans. Most of the credit for relieving that acute shortage goes to a stubborn Finnish virologist, Kari Cantell, who proudly admits that "interferon has been my hobby and main scientific interest for over 20 years." Cantell began his career by studying the role of leukocytes, or white blood cells, in fighting infection. He became intrigued when he learned from other researchers in 1961 that these cells could produce...
...white cells and partly purified to destroy the virus. What remains is a highly impure IF preparation; even after it is partly purified it consists of only one part IF for every 999 parts of other substances. To purify it totally is both impractical (99% of the interferon is destroyed) and prohibitively expensive. By last year Cantell and a small staff were turning out 400 billion units annually (one unit is the amount of IF that protects half of a cell culture in a laboratory plate from being destroyed by a test virus). That may sound like...
...endangers newborn babies and kidney- transplant patients. Israeli doctors have also used IF eyedrops to combat a contagious and incapacitating viral eye infection commonly known as "pink eye." Researchers are now trying a combination of IF and the antiviral drug ara-A in patients with chronic hepatitis B infections. Interferon investigators have high hopes that the drug will be equally active against other viral diseases...
...scientist was an American, Harvard-trained Ion Gresser, at the Institut de Recherches Scientifiques sur le Cancer in Villejuif, France. He made his own interferon by injecting viruses into the brains of laboratory mice; that stimulated the production of IF. After mashing the brains and processing them, he was left with a crude but potent solution of interferon. He gave the IF to a group of mice injected with a virus that causes leukemia, a blood cancer. After a month, the interferon-treated mice were in good health; those in an untreated control group had leukemia. Gresser then went...