Medicine: Teropterin

In Manhattan one night this week, a group of doctors and scientists listened intently as a tall, dark-haired surgeon talked about the biggest subject in medicine: cancer. Dr. Saul P. Lehv of Harlem Hospital was reporting on the first controlled study of a new cancer treatment. In guarded, technical language, he described a series of cases.

Patient E.G., 65, was dying of prostate cancer. The disease had spread to his bones and spine. He was paralyzed from the waist down. His legs were doubled up in a spasm and he was faint with pain. Two months ago the doctor began to give him daily injections. The patient was beyond noticing that he was getting a new medicine. But in three weeks he could move his legs. The pain slipped out of his body and he began to eat heartily. Last week, on shaky legs, he walked. Said a neurologist’s report on the patient’s frame of mind: “Patient is devoid of anxiety, and is hopefully looking forward to his eventual recovery.” (The doctors say it is too early to tell.)

Patient B.H., 65, had a cancer of the esophagus. He could swallow no solid food. After the fifth injection, he ate a chicken dinner.

Dr. Lehv told of trying the new drug in 20 cases. All were in the last, dying stage of cancer, beyond help from any standard treatment. Five of the 20 died in spite of the new drug. But in every case the drug had dramatically stopped the pain and at least made the patients feel healthy and cheerful. One patient, nine hours before he died, had felt so well that he demanded to be sent home.

The new drug, called Teropterin, was developed by the Lederle Laboratories, and was first tried on animals and one patient at Mt. Sinai Hospital (TIME, Sept. 15). It is a vitaminlike chemical derived from folic acid.

Doctors do not know exactly how it works. Some hope that Teropterin is the kind of material that researchers have long sought as the most likely means of fighting cancer: a substance so similar to a cancer cell’s favorite food that the cell devours it, but so devoid of nourishment that the cell starves. Dr. Lehv & colleagues are drawing no sweeping conclusions as to how effective Teropterin is against cancer; but none of the doctors doubts its effectiveness as a pain-reliever.

Lederle Laboratories, whose chemists are extraordinarily hopeful about Teropterin, has invested millions in developing the drug, and has recently begun to distribute it to hospitals for clinical tests. It is much too soon to get excited about Teropterin as a “cure,” Dr. Lehv cautioned. The Harlem Hospital group has used the new drug only three months, found that some types of cancer seemed to respond better than others. But researchers who know about Teropterin’s performance thus far think that the drug promises at least one great gain in the anti-cancer war: it seems likely to relieve the pain and suffering of cancer’s late stages, without the depressing effects of narcotics.