From: The Cancer Chronicles, A Serious Consideration of Alternative Ideas, by Ralph Moss, Ph.D., September 1996

THE TREATMENT OF CANCER WITH COLEY’S TOXINS
Coley’s toxins are a century old immunological treatment for cancer. This treatment consists of an injection into the patient of the by-products of two common bacteria, streptococcus pyogenes and serratia marcescens. Coley's toxins have also been known as Coley’s fluid, Coley toxin, or mixed bacterial vaccine. They were developed by an eminent New York surgeon named William B. Coley, who spent most of his long career as chief of the bone service at Memorial Hospital (now Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center).

The therapeutic idea was to deliberately and repeatedly invoke fevers, as high as 105º F, as well as chills and other flu-like symptoms in the cancer patient. The rationale was to provoke the immune system to attack and destroy the cancer.

HISTORICAL BASIS
This treatment did not come out of a vacuum. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was repeatedly observed that following serious infections cancer patients sometimes experienced spontaneous remissions of their malignancies. The diseases usually linked in this way to cancer were tuberculosis, malaria, and syphilis.

NINETEENTH CENTURY LINK
Coley made his discovery without knowledge of these previous European findings. In 1891, he was young and fresh out of Yale College and Harvard Medical School. His first bone cancer patient was a 19-year-old girl named Bessie who had a sarcoma of the bone. Although Coley did everything according to the textbooks, the girl had a recurrence of her cancer and died. Determined to find out why orthodox methods of surgery had failed, Coley examined the records of 100 sarcoma patients who had been treated at New York Hospital. All advanced cases had died. Eventually however, he found the case of a man who had been operated on three times with no success, but the fourth incomplete removal of his tumor in 1884 resulted in a raging case of erysipelas, with its angry red inflammation of the skin.

TRACES DISAPPEAR
Hospital records simply stated that all traces of the tumor had disappeared following the infection. Intrigued, young Coley traipsed up and down the tenements of New York’s East Side, and found the man, alive and well, in 1891. This was seven years after he had been spontaneously healed of his cancer. Fascinated by the vistas that this experiment of nature opened up, Coley reviewed the evidence for erysipelas healing in the prestigious Annals of Surgery (1891;14:199-200). Thus began his lifelong search for a cancer cure using the organism that causes erysipelas. In October 1891, Coley took the fateful step of deliberately infecting a patient who had an inoperable cancer of the tonsils and neck with streptococcus pyogenes, the bacteria that had only recently been discovered to cause erysipelas. Much to everyone’s astonishment, after severe fevers and chills, the patient experienced a complete and prolonged remission of his cancer. Coley thought he was the first person ever to do this, but we now know he was actually the fourteenth. However, the others had all been in Germany, and Coley was unfamiliar with the world literature on the subject.

To read the full article, please go to: http://www.ralphmoss.com/html/coley.pdf.

American Cancer Society's article on Coley's Toxins

Note: When my sister was diagnosed with late stage breast cancer, we did extensive research in order to find the best Coley’s formula. We found one formula that shrank her tumor in half, and it was made by a doctor here in the USA, who was giving it to patients for free. I contacted him recently (in March 2011), and he is no longer making it, but he referred me to this company, MBVax, which is still making Coley's Toxins (www.mbvax.com).

They also have Coley's toxins at Klinik St. Georg in Germany, Ralph Moss's top rated clinic for breast cancer. We also went to this clinic (and loved the storybook town of Bad Aibling and the comradery of being in a community of other people with cancer), but they were only using Coley's in conjunction with chemotherapy, and their formula was too weak.

More ideas for immunotherapies are available on the National Institutes of Health's website when you search on the term "immunotherapy."