Fever may cure cancer

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Coley's Toxins a.k.a. Mixed Bacterial Vaccine (MBV)
History

In 1888, Dr. William B. Coley (1862-1936), Harvard Medical School graduate, and eminent New York City surgeon and Sloan-Kettering researcher, stumbled across one of the most intriguing findings ever made in cancer research. In fact, his invention was a starting point for all modern immunotherapy. His discovery was first tolerated, then ridiculed, and finally suppressed, although in recent years some new interest in his discovery has emerged among researchers.

Frustrated after losing his first patient at Memorial Hospital, a 19 year old female bone cancer patient, despite an early detection followed by prompt amputation of her arm and a good prognosis, Coley began methodically searching the patient records at New York Hospital . He went back 15 years and examined records of all bone cancer patients. Most cases ended in failure and death. To his amazament, however, Coley discovered one patient who had been given up for lost by his doctors and yet had walked out of the hospital in apparently perfect health [1]. On his deathbed, this patient had suffered two attacks of erysipelas, a severe skin infection caused by bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes.

Coley's first attempts to produce reaction in cancer patients by injecting streptococcus cultures into them ended in failure. Luckily, he managed to get a particularly virulent culture from a famous German bacteriologist, Robert Koch, through a friend. The patient who received this culture developed a severe case of erysipelas with high fever. Within a few days the tumors on his tonsils and neck completely disappeared. In 1893 Coley published his first paper on the new method [2].

Because using live bacteria was dangerous and caused an ordeal for the patient, Coley later tried to and succeeded in improving his method. Instead of using bacteria, he mixed the toxins of the strep with those of another germ, Bacillus prodigiosus, which today is called Serratia marcesens. This seemed to work similarly to the live culture.

Best results were obtained when Dr. Coley or his colleague supervised the production of toxins. Parke-Davis, the pharmaceutical company, also produced the toxins commercially for many years, but they heated the formula, which reduced its effectiviness. Despite that, even this weakened form of toxins, Parke-Davis formula #IX, showed 37 percent cure rate for inoperable patients.

In 1943 NCI researcher M.J. Shears discovered that the biologically active substance in Coley's toxins is lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which occurs in the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria [4].

By 1953, however, all the production of the toxins in the United States stopped.

For over 30 years starting late 50s or early 60s, Dr. France Havas, professor emeritus of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, studied the effects of Coley's toxins in mice and humans. The results of her studies were generally favorable, even in advanced patients [5,6,7,8].

In 1976 randomized trials of mixed bacterial vaccines (MBV) - as Coley's toxins are now called - begun at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

In 1991 K.F.Kolmel and colleagues in Gottingen, Germany reported on favorable results obtained on treatment of advanced melanoma with Coley's toxins [9].

Recently Coley's toxins have been researched and used also in China. Zhao and others published 1991 preliminary results of these trials [10].
Proof

Coley's results have been tabulated by his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, D.Sc., former executive director of the Cancer Research Institute, Inc., in New York City [11]. She and her medical colleagues have documented 894 cases treated with Coley's vaccine. Examples:

Tumor type    # of operable    Alive after   # of inoper.     Alive after
                patients       5 years         patients       5 years

Giant cell
bone tumor         38           33 (87%)          19            15 (79%)

Breast cancer      13           13 (100%)         20            13 (65%)


Other 5-year survival rates: 67% in Hodgkin's disease, 67% in inoperable ovarian cancer, 60% in inoperable malignant melanoma. Overall, patients with inoperable tumor of various kinds had 45% 5-year survival, while those with operable tumors had 50%.

In 1962, Dr. Barbara Johnston, M.D. published a double blind study on Coley's toxins. This study was conducted at New York University-Bellevue Hospital. The results were clear-cut. In the control group treated with fever inducing placebo, only one patient of 37 showed any signs of improvement. Of the 34 patients treated with Coley's toxins, 18 showed no improvement, 7 noted decreased pain while 9 showed such benefits as tumor necrosis, apparent inhibition of metastases, shrinkage of lymph nodes, and disappearance of tumors [12].

In 1982 at the conference held in Cologne, Germany, Mrs. Nauts reported the first results of randomized trials of MBV (Coley's toxins) begun in 1976 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering: Advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients receiving MBV had a 93 percent remission rate as opposed to 29 percent for controls who received chemotherapy alone [13].

ranchgirl

Get fever or sick once in a while might be a good thing