In the winter of 1891, William Coley the surgeon became William Coley the detective. He headed for the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the German immigrant community lived. He knocked on door after door asking for a man named Fred Stein who had a distinctive scar across his neck. After several weeks of searching, Coley found him alive and cancer-free.
A patient named Zola had a huge tumor on his neck. Coley treated Zola with bacteria that caused him to become violently ill. Within hours the tumor began to dissolve. He recovered completely.
So why did Stein’s cancer go away and stay away after he got a bacterial infection? Coley speculated that the strep infection had reversed the cancer. and wondered what would happen if he tried to reproduce the effect by deliberately injecting cancer patients with bacteria.
He decided to test his idea on people who were the most seriously ill. His first subject was an Italian immigrant named Zola who, just like Bessie Dashiell, was suffering from sarcoma. Zola had tumors riddling his throat. He was so sick he could barely eat or speak or even breathe. For months Coley would try to make Zola sick from infection by creating little cuts and rubbing the strep bacteria into them, Hall says. There would be “a slight response but not too much.”
Then Coley got his hands on a much stronger strain of the bacteria. This time, Zola became violently ill with an infection that could easily have killed him. But within 24 hours, Zola’s orange-sized tumor began to liquefy and disintegrate. “This was a phenomenon that occurred rarely, but when you saw it you were utterly astonished,” Hall says.
Zola completely recovered. Coley knew he was on to something. He kept experimenting and refining his use of bacteria. Eventually, he named the treatmentColey’s toxins.
It was an exciting time. Coley was having tremendous success and his efforts were celebrated in America and abroad. But Bradley Coley Jr., William Coley’s grandson, says the American medical establishment at the time was skeptical. Nobody knew how Coley’s toxins worked, or why they worked sometimes and not others. Not even Coley could explain it.
That’s largely because the immune system was still a mystery and would remain so for decades to come.
When radiation therapy came along in the early 1900s, interest in Coley’s toxins was completely overshadowed by this new therapy. When his grandfather died, Bradley Coley says, “All interest in [Coley’s toxins] stopped.”
And quite possibly, that’s where Coley’s legacy would have ended except for this: After Coley’s death in 1936, his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, started looking through her father’s papers while doing research for his biography. She found about 1,000 files of patients her father had treated with Coley’s toxins.
She spent years carefully analyzing these cases and could see that he had extraordinary rates of success in regressing some cancerous tumors. She couldn’t get anyone interested in studying her father’s work, so she decided to do it herself. With a small grant, in 1953 Helen Coley Nauts started the Cancer Research Institute, dedicated to understanding the immune system and its relationship to cancer.
In the more than 60 years since, researchers have expanded their understanding of the immune system dramatically and today, that understanding is paying off. Treatments that harness the power of the immune system are now available for a range of cancers such as stomach, lung, leukemia, melanoma and kidney.
Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, says any treatment currently in use that exploits the power of the immune system to fight cancer has to “tip its hat” to the work William Coley began more than 100 years ago.