Cancer immunotherapy with levamisole.

Levamisole, an agent acting upon depressed cellular immunity, enhancing and normalizing it and consequently showing antitumor activity in the cancer-bearing body, was administered to patients with gastrointestinal cancer at a daily dose of 150 mg for three consecutive days every other week, starting as a rule, three days before operation. The patients were evaluated for survival. Of the 143 patients (66 with curative resection, 40 with noncurative resection and 37 without resection) who received levamisole therapy for one month or more, 57 survived postoperatively six months and of 44 treated 37 survived one year. In this study, 185 patients with gastrointestinal cancer were used for comparison purposes. The six-month survival rate was 100% (23/23) in the levamisole treated group and 95.3% (102/107) in the control group after curative resection (p greater than 0.5), 100% (23/23) and 90.5% (49/54) after noncurative resection (p less than 0.01), and 72.5% (8/11) and 33.3% (9/24), respectively, in non-resectable patients (p less than 0.01). The one-year survival rate was 100% (21/21) and 95.3% (102/107) after curative resection (p greater than 0.5), 77.8% (14/18) and 59.3% (32/54) after noncurative resection (0.05 less than p less than 0.1), and 40% (2/5) and 8.3% (2/24) in non-resectable patients (0.05 less than p than 0.1) in the levamisole group and in the control group, respectively. The difference in survival in survival rates between levamisole-treated and control groups was most prominent in the non-resectable patients followed by those undergoing noncurative resection and curative resection.