(7 of 10)
Mice & Men. Inspired by these gains, researchers decided that no bottle on the chemists' shelves should be left unturned. Under the leadership of Director Cornelius P. Rhoads (TIME cover, June 27, 1949), Sloan-Kettering had already begun down-the-line testing, and by nowr has gone through 20,000 compounds. But 100,000 more are available, and as many more can easily be synthesized or extracted from plants, fungi and antibiotic "beers." This was a nationwide job for NCI. Along with a score of private institutes and university laboratories, the chemical and drug industries were enlisted: Brooklyn's Charles Pfizer & Co. is at work under a $1,200,000 contract; Indianapolis' Eli Lilly & Co. does its share at its own expense.
Some 40,000 compounds got preliminary testing last year, with about one in 1,000 showing enough promise to be worth more trials in man, and the rate is expected soon to hit 60,000 a year. First test for every compound involves at least 18 mice, and the consumption of mice is enormous—more than 2,000,000 last year. All must be of pure, inbred strains. One of Rod Heller's worries is that the supply of these precious mice may not keep pace with the demand.
Perhaps the armies of mice and men could be better employed, because the screening tests now used are admittedly crude and unreliable. Not surprisingly, some chemicals that looked good in mice have failed in man, and a couple that missed in the mouse test show promise in man. But better screening methods are being sought, and some researchers believe that they have already found them.
Effective Drugs. Despite admitted drawbacks, chemotherapy has won a solid foothold. Dr. Charles Gordon Zubrod, 45, NCI's clinical director, responsible for all cancer patients treated in NIH's huge Clinical Center (TIME, July 20, 1953), . lists eight forms of the disease that can often be set back by drugs, sometimes for as long as two or three years. These are: acute leukemia in children, chronic lymphocytic and myeloid leukemia in adults, Hodgkin's disease, rhabdomyosarcoma (a rare muscle cancer), Wilms's tumor (in the kidney, present at birth), cancer of the adrenal glands, and choriocarcinoma (mainly in women, and arising from placental material). The list includes four major types of cancer—leukemia, lymphoma. sarcoma and carcinoma. This offers some hope that drugs effective against all the many forms of cancer can be found.