Cancer: Progress Reports

The American Cancer Society assembled leading researchers in Phoenix this week for an exchange of progress reports. Among the significant findings: > Though scarce and "very costly," said Yale University's Dr. Robert E. Handschumacher, a new drug shows unique promise in relieving the crises of adult patients suffering from some forms of acute leukemia. Earlier anti-leukemic drugs worked mostly in children and were almost as poisonous to the patient as to his cancerous cells. But 6-azauridine, which has to be injected, and a still newer chemical variant that can be taken by mouth apparently do not poison the patient's blood, brain or guts. They have helped severely ill patients for five or six weeks; now the researchers are trying to find drug combinations to achieve longer-lasting benefits.

> X rays can be made far more effective in treating (and sometimes curing) local ized cancers if the area can be pretreated with a hydrogen-peroxide solution injected into an artery, reported Baylor University's Dr. John T. Mallams. While limited in application, because no wide spread and few deep cancers can be at tacked this way, the method shows prom ise for cancers of the skin, mouth, and even some in the brain.

> Who gets lung cancer and what type he gets may depend partly on constitutional factors, suggested Dr. Sheldon C. Sommers of La Jolla. The commonest form (epidermoid bronchogenic carcinoma) is associated not only with irritation from industrial fumes or heavy smoking, but also with a high level of male sex hor mones in the patients. Adenocarcinoma, less common, is the usual form in women and in men with high outputs of female hormones. A third type, called "oat-cell" or undifferentiated, occurs in men whose adrenal glands put out an excess of corti sone-type hormones.

> By incubating ribonucleic acid (RNA) and protein from normal red cells with immature cells from victims of sickle-cell anemia, Cleveland's Dr. Austin S. Weisberger effected a crossover: the growing cells picked up the normal RNA and protein and, with it, the power to make normal hemoglobin. Cautiously, Dr. Weisberger hopes that similar methods may be developed for treating cancers of the blood.

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