Word: interferon
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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...
...cumulative output can be substantial. Biogen's accomplishment, brought off by Swiss Molecular Biologist Charles Weissmann and his international team of colleagues, was to re-engineer E. coli so that it would produce largely complete molecules of human leukocyte IF. At Harvard, Biochemist Tadatsugu Taniguchi, who first isolated an interferon gene while at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, and Molecular Biologist Mark Ptashne seem on the verge of getting their restructured E. coli to spew out human fibroblast...
Despite all the recent achievements, the growing excitement and the favorable early test results, the verdict is not yet in on interferon. Even IF's most fervent advocates warn against prematurely raising the hopes of cancer victims and their families. They appraise IF's prospects in the subjunctive, peppering their comments with "if" and "would" and "could." Were interferon finally to prove an effective cancer drug, there would still be a long way to go. At least a few?and possibly quite a few?years will pass before it becomes widely available. "In terms of research," says Dr. Ernest Borden...
Indeed, the interferon bandwagon seems to be gathering momentum. According to last week's Boston Globe story, the new M.I.T. production technique could bring the cost of fibroblast IF down from about $50 to only $2.50 per million units. Says the A.C.S.'s Rauscher: "Right now it's costing something like $150 a day to treat patients, and a full course of treatment can go as high as $30,000 or more. This is very good news indeed." So it is. For even if interferon should only partly live up to its initial, most tentative promise, it would augment...