Another Round in the Krebiozen Battle

Bitter controversy has raged for twelve years over a so-called anti-cancer drug named Krebiozen. A refugee physician from Yugoslavia, Dr. Stevan Durovic, said that he extracted it from the blood of specially inoculated horses in Argentina and brought it to the U.S. in 1949. Its first trials on human patients were made by Chicago's famous Physiologist Andrew Conway Ivy, who announced what he considered promising results in March 1951.

Orthodox medicine poured a flood of doubts and questions at Drs. Ivy and Durovic. What was Krebiozen (pronounced kre-by-o-zen)? Nobody knew, except that it was a whitish crystalline powder. How was it made? For years, Dr. Durovic has kept parts of the process secret. Did it really help cancer patients? On this question there was violent disagreement, intensified by wild charges (from both sides) of misleading or distorted evidence.

Krebiozen was never approved for prescription use by physicians generally. Dr. Durovic distributed it "for investigational use" to selected doctors who were supposed to describe their patients and report their results. These were inconclusive, and voices rose for a scientific test, to be run by the National Cancer Institute, to determine what the drug is and how it works, if indeed it works at all. The Ivy-Durovic group could never agree with the institute on plans for a test, and each side accused the other of bad faith. Last February, in hopes that an agreement had at last been reached, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began collecting information for the institute.

On June 7, a tough provision of last fall's Drug Amendments Act became effective. To continue interstate dealings in Krebiozen, Dr. Durovic had to file with FDA a detailed plan for his investigation. He did so reluctantly, at the last minute. Then last week, just as FDA was concluding that his plan was "grossly inadequate," Durovic abruptly withdrew his proposal, angrily charging bad faith on the part of the Government. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare responded: "Your action automatically makes illegal the continued interstate delivery of the product." Dr. Ivy defiantly announced that he would continue to give the injections "whether I go to jail or not." Durovic will supply Krebiozen only to Ivy. Thus patients who want to keep on getting injections will have to go to Illinois for them.

But Krebiozen's backers have powerful friends on Capitol Hill; last week resolutions were introduced in both houses of Congress to require the Government to give the controversial drug another chance.

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