TRANSPLANTED CANCER

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 120, 6 February 1923, Page 11

TRANSPLANTED CANCER

♦ ANIMALS RENDERED IMMUNE. Experts engaged in .research, and doctors and surgeons, whose delight it is the otie to suggest and The other to put into practice new methods of alleviating human suffering and preventing death from disease, are very reticent about announcements of “discoveries,” which often raise false hopes. Particularly is this attitude noticeable in regard to the terrible scourge of cancer, which is not stayed, though the number of agencies challenging it and * the funds and equipment available in the fight have grown very largely in recent years.

But it is not to be doubted that every now and again there aro developments about which the general public ought to know, since they subscribe liberally to institutions which have it in their special care to treat cancer patients or to pursue unceasingly the quest as to the nature and cure of the malady. The following information is therefore offered (says the ' London '‘Morning Post”), with the reservation that it is in no sense an announcement of a euro for cancer, but only a report on a procedure which has been passed on from England to the TJiiitecl States, where, simultaneously with continued research in England, it is to be pursued with the energy and thoroughness which characterise American research.

Hanau, in 1889, first recorded the transmission of cancer from one animal to another, and since 1903, when Jensen’s famous paper was published, and there came genera.! recognition that transplanted tumours are derived from living malignant cells, the subject of transmitted cancer has attracted investigators in many parts of the world, and special attention has been devoted to the branch of the cancer problem which concerns the production of immunity to tumour growth. (Dr. Helen Chambers, Miss G. AL Scott, and Professor, S. Russ, 1922.) But living tumour tissue inoculations in spontaneously affected animals .almost invariably produced tumours.

In 1910 Contamin recorded that ho had obtained a condition of immunity in tumour-bearing mice after ho had treated the growth with x-rays, and VVedd, Morson, and Russ showed that mouse carcinoma, if it had been exposed to n sufficient dose of radiation form radium, failed to grow when, inoculated into normal mipe. It will be gathered that treatment of cancer in the human body suggested by these results of research and experiment is based on the principles of immunity, and aims at increasing tho resistance of the individual who is suffering from a malignant growth. Tho Imperial Cancer Research Fund has established by experimental studies carried out for many years that there arc certainly ways in which tho resistance of an animal te a cancer introduced into it can bo increased to suclj an extent that the animal is immune. This has been achieved by using some of the ordinary tissues from an nnimnl of the same species. But unfortunately the resistance produced in this wray is rf a temporary character, and has not Been put to any service in the treiitnvint of cancer in the human body. During the course of collateral experimental studies it was found in the cancer research laboratories of the Middlesex Hospital that tumour tissue which had been first x-ra.yed sufficiently would not grow when implanted into normal animals. This dose of radiation the researchers have_ called the “lethal dose.” When- this x-rayed tissue is put into an animal the substance is soon absorbed, and in the majority of eases the animal beet roes immune to tho implantation of the variety of tumour which has been used." This immunity is of a J errnanenfc character, and the dominant idea of the process has been carried into the clinical field. It would, of course lie altogether premature yet to speak ’of “cases,” though some records have been made.