Cancer: Arrested, at Least

• Share

Larry Rink, of Centreville, Mich., who quit high school to work in a paper mill, was only 20 when his right leg had to be amputated because of bone cancer. In less than a year, the disease recurred with its usual malignancy. To Dr. Ray Houghton, an osteopathic physician of White Pigeon, it seemed that Rink's only chance lay in cross-transplants of cancer tissues with other patients—a bold technique under investigation at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo (TIME, March 11).

The young amputee went to Buffalo, where surgeons exchanged some of his cancerous tissue for tissue from patients with a similar form of osteogenic sarcoma. The hope was that, although the body does not treat its own cancerous cells as "foreign" and therefore does not destroy them by a rejection mechanism, each patient's system would regard the other's cells as foreign, and make immune cells to attack the cancer. If that happened, blood from one patient, containing the immune cells against a second patient's cancer, could be transfused into the second patient to attack his malignant cells. It might, the Buffalo doctors hoped, stimulate his immune mechanism to turn against his own cancer cells.

Beginning last March, Rink had cross transplants and transfusions with two patients, both of whom have since died. Then he had exchanges with two more patients. Last week Roswell Park pathologists sent Dr. Houghton an encouraging report: their microscopic examinations of Larry Rink's cells, like their most recent X rays and physical examinations, showed no sign of cancer.

Rink, who got married two years ago and whose wife expects a baby in September, looked forward jubilantly to getting an artificial leg and a steady job. Osteopath Houghton was more guarded: "We cannot say he is cured—we have to wait five or ten years before we can speak of a cure. But if the disease had progressed normally, this patient would have been dead by now." The Roswell Park doctors, determined not to kindle premature hopes in other cancer victims, said nothing at all.