Radiation: An End to X-Ray Agony?

Ever since Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen discovered his wonderful X rays in 1895, physicists and physicians have been burning themselves, and sometimes patients as well, with accidental overdoses. And like the damage from exposure to more recently discovered sources of nuclear energy, X-ray burns have proved virtually incurable. Despite skin grafts, they often lead to progressive gangrene and successive amputations one famed “Xray martyr,” Chicago’s late Dr. Emil Grubbé, had no fewer than 93 operations before he died.

Last week a young American scientist began treatment at a Brussels hospital with full confidence that his severe radiation burns could be cured. What had happened to change the outlook so hopefully was a chance discovery made by Belgium’s Dr. André Massart, 45.

Head of medical services for the personnel at Euratom, the Common Market’s organization for research into peaceful uses of atomic energy, Dr. Massart is largely involved in treating colds, sprains and peptic ulcers rather than radiation injuries. It was pure hunch, he says, that was operating in 1959 when he was called on to treat a young Belgian technician who had badly burned his right hand with an estimated 70,000 r. of radiation.

There were festering sores on two of the technician’s fingers, and some doctors were already recommending amputation. But Dr. Massart was reminded of other stubborn, non-healing sores that he had seen, mainly on aged and debilitated patients; he remembered that such sores had responded to injections of callicrein (Kallikrein in Germany and trade-named Padutin by Bayer), a byproduct of insulin extraction. Why not try the same stuff on the radiation sores? Medical scientists had always considered radiation burns distinct from all other types of injury. Naive or not, Dr. Massart figured that there was little to lose. He gave the technician injections of callicrein.

Within a few weeks the man’s wounds were almost fully healed. Last month Dr. Suzanne Simon of Brussels University Hospital reported that, callicrein had worked equally well in 80 of the first 100 cases so treated. Even when it failed to heal the burns, it relieved pain more effectively than morphine.

Most surprising of all, no one yet knows the chemical structure of callicrein or how it works.