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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Part:         Session:         Page of 999

Q:

How long has this been under way?

Lasker:

It was discovered in 1955 about, by two men almost simultaneously, one in England. Because it's so expensive and complex to make, nobody's been willing to put up the money to buy any large amount of it to try on humans on a big scale.

Well, I was interested in it because Dr. Strander in the Karolinska in Stockholm got enough of it from Cantell, who was making it in Finland. I think for nothing, or probably he got some money from friends in Sweden. I think they did put up some money. Strander has used it on people that had primary osteogenic carcinoma. In other words, cancers of the bone.

Now, those people usually are operated on and usually have amputations. Recently it's been done without amputation, but we won't go into that, but if you have it in your leg and your leg is amputated, presumably the amount of osteogenic carcinoma in your body is very small after the operation. But it does recur, and it recurs almost universally within a year or two, and about 33% of the people die of it in three years.

So he wanted ot use it to see if he could prevent the recurrence of it. Well, his latest figures for three years are that you can prevent the recurrence of it in 58% of the people that have it with interferon, the ones that he has tried it on, and that you have a prolonged survival in 64%. These are approximately the figures. As compared to the people who have been treated with just operation,





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