Word: strander
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News of Gresser's work inspired Hans Strander, a cancer doctor at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, who had gone to Helsinki to work with Cantell in the '60s and had done his doctoral dissertation on IF production. In 1972, using IF from Cantell's lab, Strander began injecting it into children with osteogenic sarcoma, a rare and deadly form of bone cancer. Conventional treatment of this disease is to amputate the affected limb, in the hope that the cancer has not yet metastasized. In most cases, that hope is futile. Without additional treatment, the cancer spreads rapidly to body organs...
...Strander has also used IF with seven children who have an appalling condition called juvenile laryngeal papillomatosis. In this disease, noncancerous, wartlike growths cover the vocal cords of the victim, sometimes filling up the entire larynx so that the child can barely breathe. The only treatment has been to cut them out, but they tend to recur quickly, requiring new surgery; one of Strander's patients had had 400 operations. Here too IF worked, though it was unclear whether its antiviral or antigrowth action was responsible. It diminished the growths in four cases and completely eliminated them in three. When...
...Strander's results sounded exciting to Dr. Jordan Gutterman, of the M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston. He flew to Sweden to observe Strander's work, and soon became a convert. Says he: "There was no question. He was having good results." Back home, Gutterman obtained money from a private foundation to buy enough Finnish IF to try it on 38 patients with advanced breast cancer, multiple myeloma or lymphoma. Again the results were encouraging. Seven of 17 breast cancer patients had positive results, as did six of ten with myeloma and six of eleven with lymphoma...
...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. Says he: "Quite frankly, I dragged my feet?in part because I didn't believe...
...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...
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