Word: interferons
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...designation is appropriate, because doctors still precede their cautiously hopeful statements with serial "ifs." If longer-range tests show good results. If interferon can be manufactured in the massive quantities needed for effective treatment. If it proves not to have unexpected side effects. Should these and other ifs become fact, IF will be an ideal cancer drug, for it is a natural substance, produced in infinitesimal amounts by the body. Unlike existing treatments, interferon seems not to damage healthy cells or produce horrendous side effects. Its only apparent shortcomings seem temporary and confined to slight fever, fatigue, and a small...
Even now, at ten medical centers across the U.S., the largest test ever of interferon is under way. Bought with an initial $2 million provided by the American Cancer Society (the most generous research grant in the organization's history), tiny quantities of the drug are being administered to some 70 patients with four different types of cancer ?most of them advanced?that were no longer responding to conventional treatment. As more interferon becomes available, at least an additional 75 victims will be treated...
...also abundantly clear that the big A.C.S. grant in August 1978 brought interferon instant respectability, accelerated worldwide IF research, and set off a flurry of activity in the executive suites and laboratories of the nation's drug companies. Impressed by the fact that the cancer organization thought enough of IF's prospects to invest so much of its scarce money in the test, industry decided to gamble on the drug's success. Pharmaceutical companies have now poured as much as $150 million into interferon research and production facilities. Their incentive was heightened last summer when the National Cancer Institute announced...
...hardly a week passes without some mention of interferon in the press. Last week the Boston Globe reported that M.I.T. researchers had developed a new mass-production technique that could reduce the cost of a dose of interferon to one-twentieth of its present cost. Earlier this month G.D. Searle & Co. announced plans to build a $12 million IF plant at its research facilities in Britain. Abbott Laboratories, Warner-Lambert, Merck & Co., and a number of other companies are also gearing up for interferon production. When Biogen S.A., a Swiss firm specializing in the new recombinant DNA (gene splicing) techniques...
...from white blood cells separated from donated blood. The output in 1979 was minuscule, 400 mg (.014 oz.) gleaned from 45,000 liters (90,000 pints) of blood. The effort is so painstaking that, according to estimates by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, a pound of pure interferon would cost between $10 billion and $20 billion. That price will certainly decline as large companies enter the field with more efficient production techniques. As one Wall Street analyst predicts, "The market for the stuff is probably big enough for everyone to get a share. If interferon is used...