Word: interferon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Undaunted, scientists continued to test the enigmatic substance. "People do not realize how slowly research progresses," says Dr. Jordan Gutterman, a leading interferon investigator at Houston's M.D. Anderson Hospital. "You don't go to the moon on the first rocket." At a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Houston, it became clear that interferon has at the very least had a successful launch, and may be beginning to fulfill some of its early promise...
...news in Houston was the remarkable success of alpha interferon (one of the three major types of the substance) in fighting an unusual cancer known as hairy-cell leukemia (because of the hairy appearance of the malignant cells). The disease is usually treated by removing the patient's spleen, but this seems to help in only about half the cases. For the other half, there was no viable treatment until interferon was tried. Two reports presented at the conference showed that interferon can be effective in up to 90% of hairy-cell patients, greatly reducing or completely reversing all signs...
...Americans a year, Golomb and Quesada point out that it is just one of several cancers that affect a class of white blood cells called B-cells; collectively these cancers strike 35,000 Americans a year. Says Golomb: "This may be a window into a family of disorders." Interferon has already proved useful in treating multiple myeloma, a B-cell-related cancer of the bone marrow that annually afflicts more than 8,000 Americans...
...Interferon's performance against other forms of cancer has been inconsistent, but when it does work, the results can be dramatic. It has produced complete remissions (though not necessarily permanent cures) in advanced cases of kidney cancer; in malignant melanoma, a lethal form of skin cancer; and in Kaposi's sarcoma, a skin cancer that often strikes AIDS victims. In one study reported in Houston, just five out of 52 patients with advanced melanoma were successfully treated with interferon. But this handful was extraordinary: all signs of cancer disappeared within four months, even though the disease had spread to such...
Even the most enthusiastic proponents of interferon concede that it is a difficult substance to work with, far more complex than traditional anticancer drugs. Just getting the dosages right can be tricky, and they are different * with each disease. "More is not better with the interferons," says Mathilde Krim of New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. "Giving too much can have the opposite of the desired effect...