Word: leukemias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Eddy have gone a vital step farther, treated their virus with rabbit serum, and made a vaccine that protects a big majority of normally susceptible animals against the polyoma virus' effects. At Sloan-Kettering Institute, Dr. Charlotte Friend has cultured a strain of mouse virus that causes leukemia in adult as well as newborn animals, and has perfected a protective vaccine. So in some animals, the circle of evidence is virtually complete: viruses are linked with leukemia and certain tumors, and immunity is offered through vaccination...
Attempts to devise a blood test for cancer (other than "blood cancers" such as leukemia) have been unrewarding, though Sloan-Kettering now has high hopes based on high levels of a substance called cytolipin H in cancer victims' blood. But even if such a test was reliable, it would not tell the cancer's location. Physicians still rely mainly on traditional diagnostic methods: physical examination, visual inspection of accessible sites with such aids as the proctoscope and bronchoscope, Pap smears and X rays...
...essentially new development in cancer treatment is chemotherapy's advance to the point where it gives relief from pain, and usually longer life, to 60% of patients with cancer of the lung, breast, ovary or prostate, as well as leukemia and Hodgkin's disease. From this has come a surge of confidence that increasingly potent drugs can be found that eventually will effect outright cures. So great is this confidence that the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center now gets the biggest single bite ($23 million) of NCI's budget, with $18 million going out in grants...
...yield no nourishment. First to use antimetabolites this way was Dr. Sidney Farber of Boston Children's Hospital and the Children's Cancer Research Foundation. Knowing that leukemic cells are avid for the vitamin folic acid, he began in 1947 to treat child victims of acute leukemia with analogues of folic acid. Lederle Laboratories sent Dr. Farber two, aminopterin and amethopterin. which soon brought about improvement in most of the children. But after weeks or months, their disease became resistant...
...quick succession came the hormones ACTH and cortisone, which also produced brief remissions in acute leukemia (as in some other cancers of the blood and lymphatic system). Then came another antimetabolite. pioneered by Dr. Joseph H. Burchenal of Memorial Center: 6-mercaptopurine, which interferes with cell nutrition by supplying a counterfeit purine. Physicians treating acute leukemia now ring the changes on these, using one until it loses its effect, then switching to another, sometimes back to the first. No child victims of acute leukemia have yet been saved, but Dr. Farber can report a heartening gain. A dozen years...