Word: papain
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...with a 1956 paper by Dr. Lewis Thomas, author of Lives of a Cell and now Chancellor of Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Thomas had been trying to see if various enzymes could alter concentrations of proteins in the blood. One evening, he gave adolescent rabbits intravenous injections of papain. Next morning, he found that the rabbits' normally erect ears had flopped; the papaya enzyme had dissolved the gelatinous protein of their cartilage...
...Canadian migration stems from a discovery by Dr. Lyman Smith, an orthopedic surgeon in Elgin, Ill. In the early 1960s he found that injections of papain, a simple papaya extract, dissolved the nuclei of discs between the vertebrae of rabbits. As a result, the discs shrank. If papain had the same effect on human slipped discs, he reasoned, they would shrink back into place...
Smith sold his patent rights to Baxter Travenol Laboratories of Deerfield, Ill., which extracted from papain another enzyme, chymopapain, that was more potent and less toxic. Baxter Travenol trade-named its product Disease and obtained U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 1963 for its use as an investigational new drug for humans. In twelve years doctors treated some 15,000 patients, and reported that symptoms were relieved in most cases. Meanwhile, Baxter Travenol had applied to the FDA for approval of Disease as a prescription item for any licensed physician...
...Papain, an enzyme derived from the papaya plant, is a familiar item to most housewives. Sold in grocery stores as a meat tenderizer, it can make even the toughest cuts easy to chew. Now papain is moving from the kitchen into the operating room. At hospitals in Boston and Chicago, doctors are using the extract (known medically as chymopapain) to tenderize slipped spinal discs, a treatment that relieves pain and spares many patients surgery...
...their research has, in effect, followed the same paths since 1959. Antibodies form complex, giant molecules. Porter concentrated on those parts of the molecule that give an antibody the capacity to react with a foreign or threatening substance (an antigen) and destroy it. Using a protein-splitting enzyme called papain, Porter broke the antibody molecule into three fragments. He found that the molecule is Y-shaped. The two smaller and similar parts of the structure are the ones that are capable of combining with the antigen; the larger one lacks this ability...