DESPITE IMPROVEMENTS in surgical techniques and radiotherapy, malignant solid tumors of children have remained, by and large, fatal diseases.1 This poor outlook has not been modified appreciably by the general improvement in wellchild supervision that has taken place in recent years.
During the past decade several new drugs have been found to have limited activity against various types of childhood cancer. The use of these drugs, however, for the treatment of inoperable malignant tumors has most often been reserved for those children in whom every effort has first been made to eradicate as much of the disease as possible by surgical excision, radiation therapy, or a combination of these two modalities.
The use of chemotherapy to render inoperable tumors operable, and the use of radiation therapy to prolong or augment a chemotherapy-induced tumor regression have been suggested as possible approaches to the management of inoperable malignant solid tumors of