Coley, William

The use of BRMs to treat human disease has its origins in the use of bacterial toxins to treat cancer by William B. Coley.73 These early studies resulted in the use of microbi-ally-derived substances such as BCG, Picibanil, carbohydrates from plants or fungi such as Krestin and Lentinan, other products such as Biostim and Broncho-Vaxom, as well as thymic extracts (Table 9.4). However, the lot-to-lot variation in the manufacture of these drugs has dampened enthusiasm. Equally, the focus on MOAs in drug development strategies has also dampened developmental efforts. The particulate nature of some BRMs can also result in pulmonary thrombosis and respiratory distress following i.v. injection. However, BRMs are commonly used to treat bladder cancer and derivatives of natural products are routinely used clinically. 

The suggestion that the control of cancer may be effected by immunologic methods was made about 100 years ago. At that time, William Coley observed that tumors either partially or totally... 

Mills, G. L., Coley, S. C. Williams, J. F. (1983). Chemical composition of lipid droplets isolated from larvae of Taenia taeniaeformis. Journal of Parasitology, 69 850-6. 

At the turn of the century. Dr. William B. Coley, a young surgeon in New York City, made the remarkable discovery that injection of live or inactivated pathogenic bacteria into patients with otherwise incurable cancers would oftentimes induce dramatic necrosis (a specific type of cell death) and regression of the tumors. Owing to a nmnber of factors including lack of standardization of the potency of the bacterial injections, toxic side effects, variability and sometimes total lack of effect, and the simultaneous advent of radiotherapy, these intriguing results were not followed up until much later. 

Cytokines have assumed an increasing importance in cancer biology since the early observations in 1893 of William Coley, who showed that a variety of malignant tumors regressed foEowing infection with certain bacteria. The cytokine revolution of the 1970s led to the supposition that the reasons for this were the release by bacterial endotoxin of tumor inhibitory cytokines, such as the IFNs and TNFs. It is now known that cytokines are involved in the malignant process in a number of ways. 

In 1893, William Coley, a surgeon at Memorial Hospital in New York City, deliberately injected a mixture of heat-treated bacterial cells into the tumours of his cancer patients. In all, he treated over 900 patients, and there were several dramatic remissions. He was inspired to do this by the observation that cancer patients sometimes experienced remarkable improvement in their condition following a serious bacterial infection. It was as if their already severely damaged bodies were somehow activated by the bacterial onslaught to mount a sustained attack on both the bacterial and cancer cells. Coley s toxins - usually a mixture of killed bacteria of the species Streptococcus... 

Thus, microorganisms have been used in cancer treatment. For example. Moss has a chapter about Coley s Toxins, a mixed bacterial vaccine, in the treatment of cancer (Moss, 1992, pp. 407 12). Moss calls the discovery of these toxins one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of cancer therapy. Discovered in the late nineteenth century by William B. Coley, M.D., chief surgeon at Memorial Hospital (now the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center or MSKCC), who undertook a 40-year experiment in treating and even curing cancer. Coley s Toxins may be regarded as the basis for modem immunotherapy. 

Consider the further findings of Helen Coley Nauts, founder of the Cancer Research Institute and the daughter of William B. Coley, the developer of what are called Coley s Toxins. These findings resulted in Cancer Research Institute Monograph No. 8, dated 1980, which documented some 449 cases of cancer remission in patients with bacterial infections. 

In January 1893, Dr. William B. Coley began the administration of a heat-sterilized combined culture of Streptococcus pyogenes (the virulent cause of the disease erysipelas) and Serratia marcescens (a mild pathogen involved in eye and urinary infections), His patient was a 16 year old boy with a large inoperable abdominal sarcoma tumor (a sarcoma is a cancerous growth derived from muscle, bone, cartilage, or connective tissue). The boy developed the chills, headache, fever, local redness, and swelling of an erysipelas infection. The tumor shrank by 80% and the patient remained cancer-free for more than 20 years (Hobohm, 2009). 

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley (1833-1898) designed stained glass working with William Morris. 

William A. Coley (1999), Staying in Tune With the Times, Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August, pp. 30-36. 

Fownes determined the equivalent of carbon by the combustion of naphthalene (C5H2 i.e. CioHg)/ discovered a new organic base benzoline from oil of bitter almonds, which was really Laurent s hydrobenzamide, and obtained furfurol by the action of sulphuric acid on bran and prepared a vegetable alkali (furfuramide) by the action of ammonia on it. Fownes mentions that furfurol had been noticed and named by William Coley Jones. Jones says upon distilling the lignin of wheat in a manner which I shall describe (but does not) he obtained a liquid of s.g. i-iyS-i iSy, b.p. 208 F., many chemical reactions of which he describes in detail. He says I have named the body furfurol torn furfur bran and oleum oil, being a peculiar essential oil produced from that body, either as an educt or product. He found that it is inflammable. Furfurol (kiinstliches Ameisenol, artificial oil of ants) had been discovered by Dobereiner (seep. 179). 

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