The Abortifacient Action of the Serum and Urine from Patients with Cancer

The present report describes and offers a discussion of experiments that deal with the observations of Elsasser and Wallace,2 who have stated inscience: " I t would seem, then, that the urine and serum of patients with malignan't tumors have a selective destructive action on embryonal or newly growing tissue." These investigators briefly described an abortifacient action in pregnant rabbits produced by the intravenous injection of the serum or urine from patients with malignant tumors. This effect was not observed in rabbits by Elsasser and Wallace when they injected urine or serum from normal patients, or " anterior pituitary Antuitrin S (500 units daily) together with estrogenic hormone (20,000 units) ." The uterine changes were described by Elsasser and Wallace as a progressive placental necrosis associated with an infiltration of inflammatory cells. The process was observed to start at the inner border of the decidual cells and it ultimately broadened to include the entire embryonal mass on the decidua. With the discharge or resorption of the fetal structures, the uterus eventually returned to a normal state. Early in pregnancy the abortifacient caused a rapid loss in the structure of the retained fetus, while later the fetal parts, without marked changes in their appearance, tended to be expelled. In normal female rabbits the urine or serum from cancer patients was said to produce degeneration and destruction of the granulosa-cell portions of the graafian follicles, leading to sclerosis of the ovaries. When injected into normal male rabbits the alleged cancer principle produced a degeneration of the testes leading to a complete absence of the spermatogenic processes. Elsasser and Wallace also observed that the urine from cancer patients injected into rats bearing Walker rat carcinoma 256 caused a different type of necrosis in this tumor from that which commonly occurs spontaneously. Instead of a central necrosis, which extends peripherally, the degeneration in their experiments occurred at the periphery and involved not only cancer cells but also " the epithelium of newly formed blood vessels." In rCsumC, the report of Elsasser and Wallace leads one to believe that patients with cancer produce and carry in their blood serum and excrete in their