Pharmaceutical Assessment of Amygdalin (Laetrile) Products

NCI-commissioned pharmaceutical quality analysis of oral tablet and injectable ampule amygdalin products manufactured by Cyto Pharma of Mexico, acquired for possible use in an NCI clinical trial. No source in this bundle establishes that Cyto Pharma de Mexico is the specific plant Andrew McNaughton held financial links to (TIME 1976 describes his link only as 'one of Tijuana's two...plants,' unnamed); the two facts are recorded separately rather than merged. Multiple analytic and pharmaceutical laboratories under NCI contract evaluated chemical composition and manufacturing quality. Finding: both dosage forms fell below US criteria for manufactured pharmaceutical products, were chemically subpotent, mislabeled, and of poor manufacturing quality; more than 20 ampule samples showed microbial contamination on visual inspection, and other samples were pyrogenic. The paper's conclusion, per its PubMed abstract, is that both forms were unfit for use in patients. PMID 627001 confirmed via PubMed/NCBI eutils esummary; abstract wording per EXA-indexed abstract text, not independently re-fetched from a directly loaded PubMed page (PubMed's page presented a cookie-consent interstitial to automated fetch during this research session).