Phenosulfazole

Frightened parents snatch hopefully at news of any new drug for treating infantile paralysis. One such new drug is called Darvisul. A whitish powder and a member of the sulfa family, Darvisul's scientific name is N-( 2-thiazolyl)-phenol sulfonamide. At Lederle Laboratories, where it was developed, its "working names" are phenosulfazole or Drug No. 2.

For the past month, newspapers have referred excitedly to phenosulfazole as a new "wonder drug." Because of the new drug, said the brightly colored reports, children who otherwise might have been crippled for life are walking normally. Columbia University, which is testing the drug, recently advised editors that all such stories were "premature, unauthorized . . . unjustified . . . cruel."

This week Columbia issued its first authorized report on phenosulfazole. The news was good. But the university made it plain that it will be a long time before anybody can safely use the words "cure" and "polio" in the same sentence.

In tests on 12,000 laboratory mice, the new drug produced dramatic results. It cured mice in the early stages of polio; all mice in control groups not getting the drug died. The mice that survived were immune to reinfection. Mice getting a single dose of the drug by mouth did not develop the disease when injected with mouse polio virus.

Phenosulfazole does not act directly on the virus; it seems to affect tissue cells. Without destroying the cells, it changes their physiology to make them unpalatable to the virus.

Will phenosulfazole work on human patients? Clinical trials have been made at Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons, Manhattan's Knickerbocker Hospital, the medical branch of the University of Texas, Jefferson Davis Hospital at Houston, and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest College. Said Columbia's Bacteriologist Murray Sanders: "Up to the present writing we do not know what effect Darvisul has on human poliomyelitis . . . One thing is clear. The real job lies ahead of us and no one can foresee the answer." In short, phenosulfazole is still an experiment.

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