KR for Cancer

The news was premature, perhaps, but too good to keep. Though they pointedly avoided any claim that they had found a cure for cancer, two Russian doctors last week made a cautious progress report on a promising line of attack.

In 1937 Dr. Grigori Roskin of Moscow University casually picked up an article on South America's fatal Chagas' disease, a protozoan infection spread chiefly by an acorn-sized insect, the triatoma. In female Chagas victims there is a wasting away of breast tissues, which are composed of large, spongy cells. Could it be, Dr. Roskin wondered, that the devouring parasitic trypanosomes are especially attracted to large cells? And that cancerous tissues, which are also made up of oversized cells, might also succumb to the same parasite?

Dr. Roskin imported some triatomas and turned them loose on mice implanted with cancerous tissues. Result: the cancers dwindled, and in the giant, half-destroyed cancer cells Roskin found active organisms of the Chagas disease. So far, so good --but when the trypanosomes had consumed the cancers, they attacked healthy tissues.

Suspecting that it was not the parasites themselves which attacked the giant cells, but an unidentified chemical which they secreted. Dr. Roskin called in his wife. A Moscow University microbiologist named Nina Klyueva, she developed a solution from inactivated trypanosomes --KR for the two doctors' initials. Tests proved that the KR solution cured cancer implanted in mice, but did not harm healthy mice. To make sure that it had no ill effects on human beings, Dr. Roskin injected himself with the solution.

As far as the very limited supply of KR has permitted, clinical tests have also been made on human cancers (i.e., where the growths were not so large that their dissolution would cause malfunctions). One inoperable throat cancer, Drs. Roskin & Kluyeva report, disappeared in two weeks. In an unspecified number of other cases KR "reduced" or partially destroyed cancer. But a lot more evidence is needed, the doctors admit, before the usefulness of KR can be safely evaluated.

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