BIOLOGICAL RESPONSE MODIFIERS IN HUMAN ONCOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY

The topic of biological response modifiers has attracted the attention of many biomedical investigators, including immunologists, oncologists, pharmacologists, microbiologists, and biochemists, as well as clinical practitioners of medicine. This has occurred mainly because of the realization that the complex system of cellular and humoral interactions culminating in a productive immune response is under exquisite regulatory control for normal immune responses and that loss of control may markedly influence the capability of a host to respond in a productive manner to the numerous immunologic "insults" encountered in the environment. Furthermore, biological response modification is considered by many to be a natural offshoot of the relatively new application of "immunotherapy" to cancer. It is widely recognized that "immunotherapy" was practiced at the end of the last century and the beginning of this century when it was recognized that microbial infections were caused by distinct species of bacteria and that passive administration of serum containing antibody to these microbes or their products could, in many cases, favorably influence the outcome of an infectious process. Furthermore, in the area of infectious disease it became quite apparent that "vaccines" prepared from killed microorganisms, or products thereof, could render an individual specifically resistant to that microorganism and, in many cases, increase in a nonspecific manner resistance to other organisms. This became quite evident with the advent of the use of attenuated mycobacteria for vaccination against tuberculosis. The use of the attenuated bovine strain of Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) ushered in an era of potential vaccination not only against a specific microbe but the induction of "nonspecific" immunity to other organisms. Nevertheless, it is quite evident that this idea of immunotherapy or immunomodulation in terms of infectious diseases was not pursued with much vigor because of the…