Coley Toxins

Coley Toxins

Dear Hank;

It was some time earlier this year or late last fall that I was going out to the Point to take some aerial photographs when this story came on the radio. It was a guy up in Canada who was President of a company that was bringing back Coley Toxin. Coley Toxin is the most successful cancer treatment ever developed. It has a 65% cure rate versus today’s rate of 15%. 

Why was it abandoned by the medical community? Ignorance, pride, and politics seems to be the answer. 

The story on Coley is this. He was a doctor in New York in the 1890s. Rockefeller’s son had a girlfriend with cancer. He tried the standard treatment of the day and she died a horrible death. He was so upset that he combed the records of New York General Hospital where he worked to find out about other cancer patients. They had all died shortly after leaving the hospital except for one, an immigrant living in a rough and tumble neighborhood. Coley tracked him down and discovered that when this man had been in for cancer treatment he was also sick with something else (virus? bacteria? I don’t remember). The hospital treated that too. This fellow lived for many years (decades) and died of something unrelated to cancer. Apparently, this is not called cured in medical parlance; it’s called “in remission” or some such thing. 

Coley isolated whatever it was that this fellow had and developed a serum that he could inject into others. You can’t call it a vaccine because it didn’t prevent cancer. What it did do, and he didn’t know this at the time but we do today is this - it went after the illness that was injected into the body and at the same time went after the cancer cells. The problem with cancer is that your body doesn’t recognize the cancer cells as being dangerous, but it does recognize the stuff Coley puts into the body as bad. 

The stories of the people Coley cured are remarkable. Lung cancer, bone cancer, people with a few days left to live - cured. It sounds too good to be true but the cases are documented by a major medical hospital in New York City.

His treatment is not easy. Typically, it’s a five week regimen, three times a week. Naturally, it varies by case but this is the usual course of treatment. Three times a week he would have the patient’s external body temperature raised to that of the body temperature - 98.6. In other words you’d be in a really hot room. Then he would inject you with the serum. This would cause your body temperature to rise to a higher level, typically 102 degrees. He would hold your body temperature there until the fever in your body broke (i.e. your temperature began to come down) then he would inject you again and raise your temperature again to the same level it had been before the fever broke. 

There are two interesting points I’d like to make about this course of treatment, three actually. One, it worked. It worked better than any other course of treatment at the time or that we have today. Two, apparently raising your body temperature when you aren’t sick does not have all the problems we usually associate with such a thing. Three, I’ve known someone who said whenever he felt he was getting sick he wrapped himself in an electric blanket, turned up the heat, and took a huge dose of Nyquil and let himself get really really hot. When he woke up in the morning he claimed to be not sick, i.e. cured. We do know that the body raises its temperature to fend off disease and sickness so wouldn’t this be a natural way to do it?

I started to look into Coley Toxins to find out what happened. I wanted to know why weren’t we using them today. The story is a sad commentary on our society.

It turns out that Coley made his own batches of this toxin and then turned it over to someone else to make for him. He also licensed it out to two pharmaceutical firms to make. The firms did not give the aggressive directions that Coley used nor, I believe, were their batches as strong. Hence their cure rates were a lot lower. I think they had cure rates around 32-35%, twice as good as today’s rate and about half as good as Coley’s personal patient cure rate. 

It also turns out he had someone who was very powerful within the hospital who didn’t like him. It was a fellow doctor who had come up with his own cure for cancer - radium treatment. This guy treated the daughter of Phelps Dodge, one of the largest supplier of radium in the world. The daughter died a horrible death and this guy got the lion’s share of radium in the world. He pursued Coley with a vengeance. He did everything he could to discredit Coley and make his life a living hell. 

Coley retired and died in the 1930s. His toxin continued to be manufactured until the 1960s when the FDA came along and said that they were going to grandfather in all treatments for cancer that the AMA said worked and ban the others. Guess what? The doctors who had used and or tried Coley toxins (or the pals of the radium guy) said Coley Toxins didn’t work and the FDA said okay we’ll ban them. End of story.

Until. Until this guy in Canada started to manufacture them again. When I heard the radio story it was apparently two years old so now it’s about three or four years old. His firm I discovered was bought out by a big drug firm. Not sure if this is a case similar to that of GM buying out the trolley companies or something  was it actually something good.

I do know that other than clinical trials it is banned here and in Canada. I understand that you can go to Germany for treatment. Not sure where else. 

This is the link to the Canadian firm that was bought out by Pfiezer:

http://www.mbvax.com/

Here’s the best general article (Wikipedia where else?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coley's_toxins

This is what the American Cancer Society says (they pooh-pooh it of course)

http://www.cancer.org/Treatment/TreatmentsandSideEffects/ComplementaryandAlternativeMedicine/PharmacologicalandBiologicalTreatment/coley-toxins

In my experience doctors as a group are very conservative in their views and course of treatment. I think they have to be because of all the legal problems they face. They also develop a “I know better than you because I went through medical school and know a lot more about most medical stuff than anyone else” attitude. 

These two frames of mind: being conservative and careful in their treatment coupled with their “I know better than most” attitude is not very helpful in this kind of situation. I’ve run into it when I worked on a community pool. There was a big controversy as to whether babies should be allowed in the pool because they might pee in the pool. Poop wasn’t really an issue because health regulations said anyone who was incontinent should wear rubber pants. The health department officials weren’t concerned about urine because it’s sterile and any contamination on the skin would be killed by the chemicals in the pool. I asked doctors for their opinions. It was interesting. Each doctor I asked jumped to tell me “the answer” based on the initial thought they had on the subject. The more adamant ones were the ones who rejected the notion that urine was sterile. They basically said Yes, but, as in “Yes, it’s sterile but there are bad things and trust me I’m a doctor you don’t want that.”

The other interesting thing is most people don’t want to be far from the pack. They bunch together and they trust their peers. Most doctors have never investigated Coley but the AMA and the American Cancer Society pooh-pooh it so they do too. It’s easier.

Gotta go,

Bryce