Word: interferon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toufexis' struggle to pin down details of the interferon story was made smoother by Adrianne Jucius, whose academic background in biological sciences and experience in hospitals and in medical research have been put to constant use during her three years as TIME'S Medicine reporter-researcher. Jucius, who has worked on previous cover stories on recombinant DNA (April 18, 1977), the first test-tube baby (July 31, 1978) and the escalating costs of American health care (May 28, 1979), found this week's assignment one of the most poignant of her career. "Like many people," she says...
Will the natural drug interferon fulfill its early promise...
...1970s, recent achievements in chemistry, molecular biology and genetic engineering are contributing to what could be, in several years, a major advance in cancer therapy. If all goes well, they will make possible ample supplies of what is now a rare, extremely expensive, but promising new cancer drug: interferon, or, as scientists abbreviate...
Some of that frustration may be eased over the next few years, as the pharmaceutical companies develop techniques for mass-producing interferon. Most of that IF will be produced initially by scaling up existing techniques: the stimulation of either white blood cells or fibroblasts cultivated in the laboratory. But less conventional routes are also being explored. One is to provoke the body into boosting its own manufacture of IF by injecting inducers, usually double strands of synthetic RNA* that resemble viruses. The method was tried in the 1960s by Maurice Hilleman and others at the Merck Institute. But inducers were...
...Caltech researchers have sequenced 40 of fibroblast interferon's amino acid "pearls." When the structure of the chain is fully determined, which it probably will be before the end of 1980, chemists will try to re-create IF in the laboratory. That promises to be a difficult task: so long a chain tends to break apart in synthesis. But if they succeed, pharmaceutical companies may some day be able to mass-produce this and other types of interferon using only off-the-shelf chemicals...