The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7503 p637-638
24 May 2008

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Interferon was not the miracle cure for cancer hoped for in its early days

In the eighth article in a series on landmark drugs, Jenny Bryan looks at the early history of interferon. Although it failed to provide a cure for cancer, its success in other areas, such as multiple sclerosis and hepatitis, will feature in the next article in the series

Landmark drugs series

SUMMARY

When a “World in action” team turned up at the Wellcome research laboratories in Beckenham, Kent, in the late 1970s to make a programme about interferon, they made it clear they were after “the story, not the science”.

The story — of a potential miracle cure for cancer — was making headlines around the world. But the science was a lot harder to interpret and, as it turned out over the subsequent 30 years, was not going to withstand the test of clinical trials or experience — at least in the field of cancer.

“Today, interferon only has a marginal role in cancer, in the treatment of malignant melanoma, renal cell cancer and some types of leukaemia and lymphoma. But in the late 1970s, we had high hopes for it,” explains Terry Priestman, consultant clinical oncologist at New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton, who briefly left the NHS in 1977 to join Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline) as it attempted to develop interferon as an innovative cancer treatment.

“Until that time, interferon was in short supply because it had to be laboriously produced by extracting white cells from large amounts of donated blood, and stimulating them with virus particles to get them to make interferon. Wellcome developed a method of culturing huge quantities of lymphocytes in 20-foot high tanks and stimulating them to produce interferon, so I decided it was a good time to join the company and find out if interferon really was a realistic treatment for cancer,” Dr Priestman recalls.

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