more on high body temps -- cure for cancer?

[Guest guest]

(Mindy's note: I dislike that this is called a " vaccine " since I'm

against vaccines, but it's pretty much what it is...)

 

http://www.cancerguide.org/coley.html

 

Coley's Toxins / Issel's Fever Therapy

By Matti Narkia, Helsinki, Finland

 

Introduction

Fever therapy, which has helped to stop or slow down the advancement of

my disease is an American invention, which in the latter part of this

century has mainly been practised in Europe. Because of recent

inquiries, and to pay tribute to the great American doctor who invented

this therapy, I did some homework and collected information about fever

therapy from the books of three American authors into a concise summary.

The information includes data up to 1991, I have no knowledge of what,

if anything, has happened in this area since then.

I have included contact information of some clinics which include fever

therapy in their cancer program. Some of this data may have changed. I

obtained this information from the books mentioned, I have no knowledge

of the quality of the medical services offered and therefore cannot

endorse any of them. If you have any further information - positive or

(especially) negative - of the quality of the services, success rate

etc.., of these clinics, I would greatly appreciate it if you mailed me

a comment.

 

 

Coley's Toxins a.k.a. Mixed Bacterial Vaccine (MBV)

History

In 1888, Dr. William B. Coley (1862-1936), Harvard Medical School

graduate, and eminent New York City surgeon and Sloan-Kettering

researcher, stumbled across one of the most intriguing findings ever

made in cancer research. In fact, his invention was a starting point for

all modern immunotherapy. His discovery was first tolerated, then

ridiculed, and finally suppressed, although in recent years some new

interest in his discovery has emerged among researchers.

Frustrated after losing his first patient at Memorial Hospital, a 19

year old female bone cancer patient, despite an early detection followed

by prompt amputation of her arm and a good prognosis, Coley began

methodically searching the patient records at New York Hospital . He

went back 15 years and examined records of all bone cancer patients.

Most cases ended in failure and death. To his amazament, however, Coley

discovered one patient who had been given up for lost by his doctors and

yet had walked out of the hospital in apparently perfect health [1]. On

his deathbed, this patient had suffered two attacks of erysipelas, a

severe skin infection caused by bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes.

 

Coley's first attempts to produce reaction in cancer patients by

injecting streptococcus cultures into them ended in failure. Luckily, he

managed to get a particularly virulent culture from a famous German

bacteriologist, Robert Koch, through a friend. The patient who received

this culture developed a severe case of erysipelas with high fever.

Within a few days the tumors on his tonsils and neck completely

disappeared. In 1893 Coley published his first paper on the new method

[2].

 

Because using live bacteria was dangerous and caused an ordeal for the

patient, Coley later tried to and succeeded in improving his method.

Instead of using bacteria, he mixed the toxins of the strep with those

of another germ, Bacillus prodigiosus, which today is called Serratia

marcesens. This seemed to work similarly to the live culture.

 

Best results were obtained when Dr. Coley or his colleague supervised

the production of toxins. Parke-Davis, the pharmaceutical company, also

produced the toxins commercially for many years, but they heated the

formula, which reduced its effectiviness. Despite that, even this

weakened form of toxins, Parke-Davis formula #IX, showed 37 percent cure

rate for inoperable patients.

 

In 1943 NCI researcher M.J. Shears discovered that the biologically

active substance in Coley's toxins is lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which

occurs in the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria [4].

 

By 1953, however, all the production of the toxins in the United States

stopped.

 

For over 30 years starting late 50s or early 60s, Dr. France Havas,

professor emeritus of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at

Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, studied the effects

of Coley's toxins in mice and humans. The results of her studies were

generally favorable, even in advanced patients [5,6,7,8].

 

In 1976 randomized trials of mixed bacterial vaccines (MBV) - as Coley's

toxins are now called - begun at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

 

In 1991 K.F.Kolmel and colleagues in Gottingen, Germany reported on

favorable results obtained on treatment of advanced melanoma with

Coley's toxins [9].

 

Recently Coley's toxins have been researched and used also in China.

Zhao and others published 1991 preliminary results of these trials [10].

 

 

 

Proof

Coley's results have been tabulated by his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts,

D.Sc., former executive director of the Cancer Research Institute, Inc.,

in New York City [11]. She and her medical colleagues have documented

894 cases treated with Coley's vaccine. Examples:

 

Tumor type # of operable Alive after # of inoper. Alive

after

patients 5 years patients 5 years

 

Giant cell

bone tumor 38 33 (87%) 19 15 (79%)

 

Breast cancer 13 13 (100%) 20 13 (65%)

 

 

 

Other 5-year survival rates: 67% in Hodgkin's disease, 67% in inoperable

ovarian cancer, 60% in inoperable malignant melanoma. Overall, patients

with inoperable tumor of various kinds had 45% 5-year survival, while

those with operable tumors had 50%.

In 1962, Dr. Barbara Johnston, M.D. published a double blind study on

Coley's toxins. This study was conducted at New York University-Bellevue

Hospital. The results were clear-cut. In the control group treated with

fever inducing placebo, only one patient of 37 showed any signs of

improvement. Of the 34 patients treated with Coley's toxins, 18 showed

no improvement, 7 noted decreased pain while 9 showed such benefits as

tumor necrosis, apparent inhibition of metastases, shrinkage of lymph

nodes, and disappearance of tumors [12].

 

In 1982 at the conference held in Cologne, Germany, Mrs. Nauts reported

the first results of randomized trials of MBV (Coley's toxins) begun in

1976 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering: Advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma

patients receiving MBV had a 93 percent remission rate as opposed to 29

percent for controls who received chemotherapy alone [13].

 

 

Mindy