Neuter Hormone

A synthetic substance that belongs to the sex hormone family but has no effect on sex characteristics and is not really a hormone* was reported last week to be the most promising new weapon in the drug treatment of breast cancer. Dr. Albert Segaloff, of New Orleans' Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation, described the paradoxical chemical and its promising performance to 750 experts gathered in Washington by the Public Health Service's Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center to report progress on the most active sector of the anticancer front (TIME, July 27).

In most women, at some stages of the disease, breast cancer can be slowed down or actually made to shrink by the male sex hormone testosterone. But this has unwanted side effects, causing many patients to grow beards and develop deep voices. Some women, Dr. Segaloff noted, put feminine charm before health and life and refuse testosterone treatment. But recent research, notably at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, has shown that when the body breaks down natural hormones, many of them have chemical descendants which are surprisingly potent, and sometimes in different ways from their parent substances.

In a related process, testosterone can be transformed into testololactone. Chemists at E. R. Squibb & Sons had found that bacteria could make testololactone by fermentation. When they tried to produce it this way in bulk, said Dr. Segaloff, the bugs rebelled and turned out instead a variant called delta-1-testololactone. It was just as well: testololactone has proved to have all the virilizing properties of testosterone. But the delta1 variant, tested so far in 24 patients, proved in seven cases to be as potent as testosterone in suppressing cancer growth, and with no virilizing effects.

Medical researchers had begun to despair of finding chemical cousins of sex hormones from which the sex-character stimulation could be divorced. But now that chemists have turned the trick with male hormones, they hope to repeat it with female hormones. This could be important to men, in far greater numbers than to breast cancer victims, because female hormones appear to afford some protection against the major dangers of atherosclerosis. But many men have refused them because of the feminizing effects from the doses usually given.

* Recalling Voltaire's definition of the Holy Roman Empire: "Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire."

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