Word: rauscher
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...reason for the current caution is the difficulties researchers are encountering in perfecting the use of interferon as a possible cure for cancer. After well over a year of testing on human patients, "interferon hasn't yet done anything better than any other anticancer drug," says Frank Rauscher, senior vice president for research of the American Cancer Society...
Indeed, the interferon bandwagon seems to be gathering momentum. According to last week's Boston Globe story, the new M.I.T. production technique could bring the cost of fibroblast IF down from about $50 to only $2.50 per million units. Says the A.C.S.'s Rauscher: "Right now it's costing something like $150 a day to treat patients, and a full course of treatment can go as high as $30,000 or more. This is very good news indeed." So it is. For even if interferon should only partly live up to its initial, most tentative promise, it would augment...
...with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. Though it is too early in the treatment of patients with lymphoma (a cancer of the lymph system) or melanoma (skin cancer) to assess the effect of the drug, the attending doctors see encouraging signs. Discussing the early results, Frank Rauscher, head of research at the A.C.S., was emphatic. Said he: "The answer is yes. There is definitely activity against cancer. Abundantly, clearly...
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...