Reports from the Front

The war against cancer is no pitched battle but a long attrition by patrols and probing actions. Last week the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago heard reports from some of its patrols. No secret weapon was unveiled and no immediate break through was foreshadowed, but the progress was steady and encouraging.

One major handicap in cancer research has been the difficulty of growing human cancers in laboratory animals so that a whole arsenal of chemicals, viruses and antibiotics may be tested directly upon the human instead of the animal varieties of the disease. Dr. Helene Wallace Toolan of Manhattan's Memorial Center reported that during the last year she had found what seemed to be the answer: human cancers took hold readily and grew well in rats that had first been dosed with cortisone. The hope in it for humans: more human cancer tissue to experiment with safely.

P: The use of radioactive antibodies as "guided missiles" against cancerous tissue was reported by Doctors David Pressman and Leonhard Korngold, both of Memorial Center. They injected a suspension of mouse cancer into rabbits, whereupon the rabbits reacted by producing antibodies with a special affinity for the invading cancer cells. Serum containing these antibodies was taken from the rabbits and combined with radioactive iodine, then injected into the cancerous mice. When the cancers were later removed from these mice, the doctors found that the radioactive antibodies had concentrated in the malignant tissue. The hope: to transport destructive amounts of radioactivity to human cancer tissue selectively, and without damage to normal tissue. P: There is no known cure for leukemia, the blood-corpuscle cancer to which children seem particularly prone, but medicine has developed several methods of controlling it for limited periods. Five doctors from Memorial Center reported a new addition to medicine's weapons against leukemia: a chemical known as 6-mercaptopurine. One hundred and seven patients, 45 of them children with acute leukemia, have been treated with the drug to date; about 30% of them have had remissions of the disease lasting from one to six months. After treatment by other methods of combating acute leukemia, such as the antifolics and the hormones, ACTH and cortisone, patients are likely to develop resistance which makes treatment no longer effective. In such cases 6-mercaptopurine may buy more time.

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