Word: interferon
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...bold proposal. Dr. Jordan Gutterman of Houston's M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute had applied to the American Cancer Society for a grant of more than a million dollars to buy interferon, a scarce and expensive substance that has shown promise in cancer research. To buttress his request, Gutterman reported that of ten advanced breast cancer patients he had treated with interferon, four had shown shrinkage of their widespread tumors. Those results, following encouraging news about interferon in animal and human tests by other researchers, seemed too compelling to ignore. Exceeding even Gutterman's expectations, the A.C.S. set aside...
...Interferon is a large hormone-like protein produced by the cells of all vertebrate animals. It was discovered in 1957 in Britain by Virologists Alick Isaacs and Jean Lindenmann during their investigation of a curious phenomenon: people are almost never infected by more than one virus at a time. Seeking an explanation, the researchers infected cells from chick embryos with influenza virus. What they found was a substance that protected the chick cells from both the flu and other viruses. Because it interfered with the infection process, it was dubbed interferon...
...Hilleman's group reasoned that since it seems to be the nucleic acid in the virus' core that provokes natural interferon output, something like a harmless form of nucleic acid might stimulate the increased production they were seeking. They tested helenine, extracted from a mold related to those that make penicillin and already known to have antiviral properties (though no one then knew why). Extraordinarily complex extraction procedures yielded a pure ribonucleic acid (RNA). But this was no ordinary RNA, such as occurs in the cores of many viruses in molecules of single strands. This proved...
Finally, the researchers took reovirus-3, a common cause of respiratory and intestinal infections in man and remark able because its RNA core is normally double-stranded. Unlike the whole vi rus, the purified RNA extracted from it did not cause infections, but it stimulated interferon production within an hour in cells grown in the test tube. The process usually requires five hours with the whole virus...
Though it will take years to translate the Merck group's findings into everyday medical practice, the prospects are promising. Previously, they had appeared dim because man normally produces so little interferon. And interferon from one species is of little or no use in another, so there was no chance of "growing" it in animals for later use in man. But now it seems virtu ally certain that man can be stimulated to produce it by a periodic intake of a harmless form of RNA, either injected or even more convenient, by means of an inhaler. Though the maximum...