Casting Out Cancer

Medical experts have long suspected that organs donated by cancer victims might cause danger--and possibly death --to their recipients. Still, for lack of other available transplant sources, they continued using them. Last week, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, a kidney transplant team at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital told how cancer can be transplanted along with a donated organ. At the same time, they provided new, clear-cut evidence that cancer, like a foreign organ, can also be rejected.

At least four early transplant patients who had received kidneys from donors with cancer later developed cancer themselves. Two of the four, operated on by a team headed by Dr. Richard E. Wilson, died as a result. A third died of complications following surgery. The fourth recipient, a 38-year-old father of ten, survived, further proving that the body's immunological processes may cast out cancerous tissue in the same way that they reject any transplanted tissue when immunosuppressive drugs are not used.

The kidney that Joseph J. Palazola received in August 1964, came from a donor who had died of cancer that had spread from the lungs to the brain. At the time of the transplant, there was no evidence to suggest the cancer had traveled to other parts of the victim's body. Nonetheless, Palazola developed a malignant tumor near the transplanted kidney within 18 months. When radiation treatments failed to reduce the tumor, Palazola was taken off immunosuppressives. When this caused rapid rejection of the transplant, the kidney and most of the tumor were excised.

By August 1966, six months later, Palazola's immunological defenses had rid him of all the remaining cancer tissues.

Dr. Wilson and his colleagues performed a second transplant on Palazola in November 1966. This time the donor was his mother. Last week the doctors reported that "he had returned to full daily activity and has remained free of cancer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.