Word: interferon
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...recalls. "The disease progressed to where I would have an attack every six months. I was hospitalized three times." For the past five years, however, Arens has managed to remain symptom-free, the result, she is convinced, of regular treatments with a promising, if still experimental drug, beta interferon. "I used to see a wheelchair at the end of the tunnel," says Arens. "Now I see a life...
...reality, Arens doesn't know for sure whether the injections she has been giving herself every other day contain beta interferon. As one of 372 participants in a clinical trial overseen by 11 medical centers in the U.S. and Canada, Arens realizes she may have been randomly assigned to a control group and given a harmless placebo, in this case saline solution. But some telltale side effects -- chills and inflammation at the injection site -- suggest, to Arens at least, that she has been receiving the genuine article...
Last week a Food and Drug Administration panel reviewed soon-to-be-published results from the clinical trial in which Arens has been participating. The study showed that patients receiving a recombinant form of beta interferon did better than those getting the placebo. The difference was quite dramatic for those patients who received high dosages of the drug, which is manufactured by Chiron Corp. and Berlex Laboratories. Compared with the control group, high- dose patients suffered 50% fewer serious attacks of the disease, and those attacks were of shorter duration. Moreover, brain scans revealed that this group of patients incurred...
...path that led medical researchers to beta interferon was hardly straightforward. Initially, some scientists believed attacks characteristic of multiple sclerosis might be triggered by chronic viral infections. So in 1984 they began testing gamma interferon, one of the body's own antiviral weapons, in MS patients. To their horror, patients became dramatically worse. The false step proved instructive however. "It told us that gamma interferon was a major player in this disease," explains neurologist Dr. Kenneth Johnson of the University of Maryland at Baltimore...
Researchers later learned that the level of gamma interferon present in the cerebrospinal fluid of MS patients skyrocketed just before and during acute attacks. Attention therefore shifted to a cousin molecule, beta interferon, which appears to play the role of inhibiting gamma. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Avertano Noronha and his colleagues demonstrated that beta interferon markedly decreased the activity of white blood cells obtained from multiple sclerosis patients. Beta interferon, they found, not only restrained the proliferation of these cells, it also shut down their production of myelin-destroying compounds...