Augmenting Agents in Cancer Therapy

The title of this book implies that there are chemicals or biologic materials, augmenting agents, that work by enhancing the activity of other forms of therapy rather than through any direct effect themselves. In fact, the volume is an encyclopedia of many disparate kinds of natural or synthetic products that work directly or through the immune system with the goal of causing tumor-cell regressions. It can best be described as a polyglot of papers submitted to a meeting on this subject, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, to identify new agents for its biologic modifiers program. The style of the papers, the typescript, and the quality are quite heterogeneous. One suspects that much of the material is not really new, since many of the references cite publications that are 5 to 10 years old. If one looks beyond the form of the book to the material, one is faced with