Word: trypsin
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...specific enzyme on which Dr. Innerfield has been working is trypsin, a secretion of the pancreas. In some situations, claims Dr. Innerfield, trypsin can be the answer to a doctor's prayer. As a therapeutic agent, it effectively speeds up the body's host reaction to injuries. Moving in the blood stream to an area of inflammation, trypsin can stimulate the white corpuscles there to prodigious feats of valor against invading organisms...
...first Dr. Innerfield and his associates at Manhattan's Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital gave trypsin to patients by intravenous drip. Other medical researchers objected that this method was unsafe, and a possible cause of blood clots. While not expressly conceding the point, Inner-field worked out another way of administering trypsin-intramuscularly...
...first, trypsin was used mainly in wound dressings or in local injections to clear infections in the chest. Lately, in purified form, it has been injected into veins and muscles. Dr. Innerfield dripped it into the veins of rabbits and dogs and concluded that it was safe; large doses, he said, had a powerful effect in preventing the formation of blood clots and dissolving those already formed. He has since given it to 428 patients with 52 different complaints and, he says, with good effect in nearly all: reduction of inflammation and swelling in arthritis, dissolution of blood clots...
Almost simultaneously, Heart Specialist Irving S. Wright reported opposite and alarming results after experiments with trypsin which he and Dr. Alex Taylor did at New York Hospital. Half their rabbits died, and were found to have blood clots or hemorrhages in the heart and lungs. Dr. Wright quoted two other doctors who had given trypsin to nine human patients: six of them developed a total of eleven blood clots in the veins into which the enzyme was dripped. Dr. Wright concluded that trypsin should not yet be made available for general prescription...
Since the Innerfield article appeared in the A.M.A. Journal, doctors and laymen all over the U.S. have been bombarding Chicago's Armour Laboratories with requests for the purified form of trypsin. The laymen, and most doctors, will get none. Actually, more than 40 research groups have already worked with trypsin, and none has had as much success as Dr. Innerfield in dissolving clots. Some agree that it cuts down inflammation, but so do other things which are safer. The research will go on, and some day the contradictions will be resolved. Meanwhile, the dawn of the age of enzymes...