60% Cured

Denied the use of human subjects, researchers make most of their cancer experiments on animals. One vicious type of animal cancer--"mouse sarcoma 180"--is highly resistant to such ordinary methods of treatment as radium and X-ray therapy. In very few cases does it dry up and disappear spontaneously. More important, mouse sarcoma 180 is a reliable subject on which to test the effectiveness of various treatments for human cancer.

Casting about for something new with which to attack mouse sarcoma 180. Dr. Richard Lewisohn of New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital decided to try spleen extract. The functions of the spleen, an organ in the upper left abdomen, are not wholly understood but one of them is to disintegrate red blood corpuscles and set free their hemoglobin. It has been observed that when bits of cancer are transported by the bloodstream to colonize elsewhere in the body, the spleen is seldom affected. Spleen extract had been tried against cancer before, without success. Dr. Lewisohn decided that was because the concentration was too weak.

He took 281 healthy white mice, implanted cancers under their right armpits by injections of tumor particles of mouse sarcoma 180. The spleen extract which he prepared to use was in high concentration. In most of the mice, hemorrhage then occurred at the cancer site. This was soon covered by a scab which in time was thrown off and the wound eventually healed. The cancer had disappeared, leaving no trace except a slight sparseness of hair over the region it once occupied. Five months after treatment there were no recurrences. In Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics last week Dr. Lewisohn gave the percentage of cancerous mice thus cured as 60%.

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