Immunity against cancer
Anna Petrenko, Copper News
Peregrine Laziosi, an Italian monk born in 1260, developed a tumor that doctors considered cancerous. His leg was very swollen, the sore was rotting and smelled accordingly: apparently, an infection had got into the neoplasm. The only thing that the medicine of that time could help him with was to amputate a limb. When the surgeons finally decided to get down to business, it turned out that the tumor had regressed. After some time, the leg completely healed. His healing was attributed to divine intervention. Peregrine lived happily without cancer relapses and died at the age of 85. In 1726, he was canonized and recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as the patron saint of cancer patients. And this is just one example of spontaneous remission of cancer in infections.
Statue of St. Peregrine in the chapel dedicated to him in San Juan Capistrano, California. Photo: Tim Buss / Flickr
At the end of the XIX century, based on his observations, the London surgeon Campbell de Morgan wrote that cancer regressions occur after infection with infections already in the postoperative period. He stressed that once these data could help in the development of antitumor treatment.
The Father of ImmunotherapyCampbell de Morgan's observation did not go unnoticed.
American surgeon William Coley, who was nicknamed the father of immunotherapy, in 1893 introduced streptococcal organisms to a 16-year-old patient John Ficken with an incurable massive sarcoma. After a few months, the tumor disappeared – apparently, it was attacked and destroyed by the immune system. With this experience, Kohli began a life-long study.
The scientist added other bacterial products from Serratia marcescens to the modified injection mixture. This development became widely known and was called "Coley's Toxins".
During his forty years as head of the Bone Cancer department at Memorial Hospital of New York (now Memorial Sloan-Kattering Cancer Center), Kohli tested his invention on more than 1,000 cancer patients. He and other doctors using the mixture claimed that such treatment was highly effective, especially in the case of bone sarcomas and soft tissue sarcomas. Until the 1960s, several pharmaceutical companies produced versions of the vaccine.
Unfortunately, Kohli neglected to draw up clear protocols of his experiments, and it was difficult to reproduce them. In addition, contemporaries reacted to its results rather skeptically. The radiation therapy and chemotherapy that broke into the scientific world threw the scientist's technology to the sidelines. In 1962, the FDA refused to recognize "Kohl's toxins" as an authorized drug.
The scientist's daughter Helen Coley Nauts (1907-2001) continued her father's work: they devoted their lives to studying his works, recordings and published 18 monographs on this topic. It turned out that out of more than 1,000 patients, 500 had almost complete remission of the disease. In addition, a reassessment of Kohli data in 1994 by researchers Wieman and Starnes (Wiemann & Starnes) showed that "Kohli toxins" led to remission in 64% of cases and a five-year survival rate of 44%. Such results are comparable or even superior to the outcomes of modern treatment methods.
Modern view of immunotherapyThe modern history of immunotherapy began with many small discoveries.
In parallel, scientists accumulated and deepened their knowledge of immunology. It became obvious that the immune system and the development of cancer are closely related.
In the 1970s, the first human clinical trial was already conducted. Interferon alpha – cytokine, a signaling protein of the immune system mainly in viral infection – was successfully tested on 14 cancer patients and led to regression of metastatic breast cancer, low grade lymphoma and multiple myeloma. In another experiment, it was shown that tumor reduction under the action of endotoxins depends on T-cell immunity.
In the 1980s, a publication appeared reporting the first successful treatment of a patient with B-cell lymphoma with highly specific monoclonal antibodies. This experiment led to the development of the drug Rituxan, which became the first drug based on monoclonal antibodies approved by the FDA for the treatment of cancer.
At the same time, they began to study the difference in the genetic regulation of healthy and cancer cells and for the first time showed the role of human papillomavirus HPV in the development of cervical cancer. This later led to the development of preventive vaccines.
Further discoveries multiplied like a snowball. Finally, immunotherapy is now approaching its rightful place in antitumor treatment. The strategies of such treatment are diverse, it uses various immune cells, cytokines and antibodies.
Dr. Roy Herbst from the Yale Cancer Center at the end of 2014 said in an interview with the BBC: "Cancer immunotherapy has opened up a completely new opportunity for the treatment of the disease along with chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery... Now clinicians are faced with the task of studying how it is combined with other methods."
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru06.05.2015