Big Break-through In Hemophilic Treatment

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31080, 8 June 1966, Page 22

Big Break-through In Hemophilic Treatment

For years diabetics have been able to treat themselves with injections of insulin to prevent comas. Recent advances in research into the bleeding disease known as hemophilia mean that hemophilics may soon be able to treat themselves in a similar way.

Hemophilia is an hereditary disease caused by the lack of anti-hemophilic globulin (AHG) which normal blood or plasma contains. Those who inherit this deficiency bleed very readily and are subject to hazards that would not normally affect others.

Even a tooth extraction or a cut finger can be a major hazard for them, because the bleeding cannot be stopped without transfusions of normal blood to raise their AHG levels to at least 30 per cent of that in normal blood. But the AHG molecule lives only 12 hours and does not keep well in a bottle, so hemophilics have to have transfusions of fresh blood or freeze-dried blood. Transfusions have to be continued until the wound has healed, which takes five or six days and up to 36 units of blood or plasma. This is a considerable drain on blood bank resources. It would be unnecessary if the AHG molecules could be extracted from normal blood in concentrated form and injected regularly into the bloodstreams of hemophilics. Within Sight

At last this is within sight. The North Canterbury Hospital Board’s blood transfusion service last week received its first supply of freeze-dried AHG concentrated 30 times. “There have been tremendous efforts to concentrate AHG,” said Dr. F. W. Gunz, the board’s hemotologist. “In Sweden it has been produced at 10 times its normal concentration, but this is very expensive. Its use was suggested to the Transfusion Advisory Committee, but it would have cost £250 for six units—barely enough to treat one patient. “Now a research worker named Dr. Judith Graham Pool at Stanford University’s blood bank has suddenlyfound a simple and cheap way of concentrating AHG. “Fresh plasma is frozen rapidly and then slowly thawed in an ordinary refrigerator. The AHG precipitates

out and can be collected by centrifuging. It can be done easily, and the effect is that the whole of the AHG in a unit of plasma can be concentrated into three cubic centimetres—concentrated 30 times. And it can be freezedried to preserve it,” said Dr. Gunz.

“They are beginning to extract and concentrate it still further and the time is rapidly coming when the concentration will be so great that it will be possible to give AHG intramuscularly. Then we will have a prophylactic. This is a great break-through. Dr. Gunz predicted that the highly concentrated form of AHG capable of being used as regular treatment by hemophilics might be available “within the next year or two.” He said there were no real difficulties in the way.

There are about 150 hemophilics in New Zealand, some 15 of them in the North Canterbury area. It is a disease which has affected the interrelated royal families of Britain and Europe, and the monk Rasputin gained his evil influence over the Empress Catherine of Russia because of his claim that he could cure her son of the disease. Because of the way in which it is inherited, hemophilia usually affects males only. The daughters of male sufferers are not affected by it, but bequeath it genetically to their own sons. If a female “carrier” of hemophilia marries a man who is a hemopholic, their daughter can get the disease, but Dr. Gunz says that only three or four such cases have ever been recorded.