Interferon: The Dawn of Recombinant Protein Drugs

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XIV

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2. Is There Life Without Interferon?

   • N. B. Finter

   Pages 1-14

3. What Constitutes Therapeutic Success? The Interferons (1978–1998)

   • T. Pieters

   Pages 15-31

4. The Prehistory and History of the Uses of Interleukin-2 in Cancer Therapy

   • I. Löwy

   Pages 33-68

5. Interferon-α: From Pass Interference to Cytokine Networking

   • P. Fitzgerald-Bocarsly

   Pages 69-88

6. A Biosemiotic View of Interferon: Toward a Biology of Really Living Organisms

   • Y. Kawade

   Pages 89-106

7. The Clinical and Social Impact of Interferon-β: The First Approved Therapy in Multiple Sclerosis

   • H. F. McFarland

   Pages 107-119

8. Interferon: The Dawn of Recombinant Protein Drugs

   • J. Lindenmann, W.-D. Schleuning

   Pages 121-134

9. Back Matter

   Pages 135-138

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Forty years of Interferon I wish to dedicate this short introduction to the memory of Alick Isaacs (1921-1967), and to that of Sir Christopher Andrewes (1896-1988). Let us go back more than 40 years. In 1956 Isaacs was in charge of the Wodd Influenza Centre. Andrewes was head of the division of bac­ teriology and virology, and deputy director of the National Institute for Medical Research in London. When researchers are faced with a seemingly new phenomenon, ex­ planations are easy to come by. These explanations fall into two broad categories: the phenomenon in question is either due to something or to the lack of something. I apologize for the primitive way in which I ex­ press this, but I am going to give three examples, scattered over 100 years, of what I mean. First example: in 1880 the great French microbiologist Louis Pas­ teur was involved in work on chicken cholera. He was struck by the following observation: if a suitable chicken broth was inoculated with the bacterium, the organism grew profusely and the liquid became tur­ bid. If he now freed the fluid, by sedimentation or filtration, from the bulk of the organisms and re-inoculated it with the same bacterium, no growth occurred.

• Multiple Sclerosis
• Protein Drugs
• cancer
• cancer therapy
• cytokine
• cytokines
• interferon
• protein
• proteins

• Gockhausen, Switzerland

  J. Lindenmann

• Schering AG, Berlin, Germany

  W.-D. Schleuning

Policies and ethics