Making Cancer Glow

Tetracycline is one of the most familiar and widely used antibiotics for the cure of infections. It has no effect against cancer. But now it seems that by a peculiar quirk, tetracycline may become one of the diagnostician's sharpest tools for cancer detection. And early detection is half the battle in curing many forms of the disease.

For reasons unknown, drugs of the tetracycline family concentrate more in cancer cells, and stay in them longer, than they do in normal cells. Tetracycline has the further peculiarity of glowing yellow under ultraviolet light. To put these peculiarities to use, doctors generally give suspected cancer patients a dose of tetracycline four times a day for two days, then wait 36 hours for the drug to leave all the body's cells except those that may be cancerous. After that, samples of body fluid drained from the areas involved are centrifuged, spread on filter paper, dried and examined under ultraviolet light. "The smallest pinpoint of bright yellow fluorescence" is considered evidence of cancer, say Dr. Leslie J. Sandlow and Dr. Heinrich Necheles in this week's A.M.A. Journal.

The yellow-glow technique was first used to diagnose cancer of the stomach, which is hard to distinguish from simple ulcers of the stomach. Then other researchers began to use tetracycline to find other elusive cancers. A University of Oklahoma team headed by Dr. John P. Colmore got surprisingly good results from tests on patients with lung cancer. They reasoned that while it is hard to get test fluid containing cancer cells out of the lungs or bronchi, there are likely to be some in a patient's mucus. And since some mucus is swallowed, especially during sleep, there should be cancer cells in a patient's stomach in the morning. In nearly all their cases that later proved to be lung cancer, the tetracycline glow gave an early, accurate report. Only one of 15 men being treated for other diseases, and tested for comparison, gave a "false positive" glow. It now appears that this man, too, may have early lung cancer.

In their latest findings, Drs. Sandlow and Necheles report equal accuracy in other hard-to-detect forms of cancer. The test was positive and accurate in seven out of seven cases of cancer of the pancreas, in 12 out of 12 who had cancer involving the pleura (the lining of the chest cavity), and in 12 more with cancer of the abdominal cavity.

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