Word: interferons
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...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...
...noted among other evidence the response of his first breast cancer patient: "She had a mass under her left arm, and couldn't raise her arm. Within 48 hours of her first injection, she could lift it." Another breast cancer victim is in remission after 15 months of interferon therapy. Gutterman also reports a wide range of sensitivity among patients, some showing improvement within 48 to 72 hours and a 50% reduction in the size of their tumors within three to four weeks after IF therapy. One patient with myeloma received interferon for three months with no apparent effect...
Gutterman's application to the A.C.S. reached the desk of Frank Rauscher, who before becoming the society's research chief in 1976 had been director of the National Cancer Institute for five years. At the institute he had been urged repeatedly to "do something about interferon." But Rauscher, himself a virologist, had moved cautiously. He did send an NCI team to Sweden to look at Strander's IF tests with bone cancer, and the institute co-sponsored a 1975 interferon conference in Manhattan. But during his tenure, Rauscher increased the NCI commitment to interferon by a scant $1 million yearly...
...July 1978, as Rauscher surveyed the evidence assembled on his desk, his outlook had changed. New data from Strander, with better controls, were impressive. There were reports by other researchers of positive IF effects on tumors. Cantell had upped his production of interferon, and the evidence accompanying Gutterman's request for $1.5 million to buy IF was persuasive. Rauscher was convinced. He left his office, went upstairs to the A.C.S. executive offices and declared: "It's time to bite the bullet on interferon." The big drive for IF had begun...