Medicine: Again, Krebiozen

University of Illinois Physiologist Andrew Conway Ivy has been at the center of a medical storm ever since he an nounced, five years ago, that he was experimenting with a secret cancer drug named Krebiozen. After studying several independent, critical assays, the A.M.A. flatly rejected Krebiozen as a treatment. Undismayed, Ivy and two colleagues stuck to their work, have now summarized it in their first public report.*

Krebiozen is a whitish powder prepared from the serum of horses that have been injected with material from an abscess (known as “lumpy jaw”) occurring in cattle. Its effect, according to Yugoslav-born Dr. Stevan Durovic, its discoverer, is to provide the body with a regulatory hormone that it needs to control the multiplication of cells.

Ivy & Co. report on 687 patients, 285 of whom died within i½ to nine months of beginning treatment. All but seven are described as having been in the “terminal” or hopeless stage, and in 97% the disease was said to be progressing. Of 189 who got four or more doses, 23 lived four years or more, and 18 of these survived because of “Krebiozen or natural causes”; there was some evidence in some cases that the cancers shrank. The Ivy team’s conclusions : 1) Krebiozen had “palliative potency,” as distinct from a curative effect, in 68% of patients with different types of cancer; 2) it has “oncolytic” (tumor-dissolving) qualities; 3) it deserves further testing.

Even these well-hedged claims faced certain rejection by top authorities in cancer research and treatment. One cancer expert was quick to doubt that Dr. Ivy’s 23 survivors had been, as claimed, in a hopeless stage of the disease to begin with, or that their survival had any medical significance: many patients with a variety of cancers have survived for unpredictably long times with scant treatment of any kind. Moreover, other doctors pointed out, several of the patients got other treatments (X rays, hormones or surgery) besides Krebiozen, and it was impossible to sort out the effects.

* Observations on Krebiozen in the Management of Cancer (Henry Regnery; $2.50).