William Coley
| William Bradley Coley | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
January 12, 1862 Westfield, Connecticut |
| Died | April 16, 1936 (aged 74) New York City |
| Parent(s) | Horace Bradley Coley Clarina B. Wakeman |
William Bradley Coley (January 12, 1862 – April 16, 1936) was an American bone surgeon and cancer researcher, pioneer of cancer immunotherapy. He developed a treatment based on provoking an immune response to bacteria. In 1968 a protein related to his work was identified and called tumor necrosis factor-alpha.
He was born on January 12, 1862 in Westfield, Connecticut to Horace Bradley Coley and Clarina B. Wakeman.
He began his career as a bone surgeon at New York Cancer Hospital (which later became part of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center); however, he became more interested in cancer treatment when one of his early patients, Elizabeth Dashiell, died from bone cancer. While going through hospital records, Coley found a sarcoma case study of one patient named Fred Stein, whose tumor disappeared following a high fever from erysipelas infection, now known as . This sparked Coley's interest and drove him to find what few examples of similar cancer treatment had been previously recorded. He discovered that other medical pioneers including Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Emil von Behring, had recorded observations of erysipelas infection coinciding with cancer regression.
From 1925 to 1933, Coley served as Surgeon-in-Chief of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.
Coley developed the theory that post-surgical infections had helped patients to recover better from their cancer by provoking an immune response. In 1891 he began to experiment by deliberately causing this phenomenon, injecting bacteria directly into people being treated; later because this had the adverse effect of causing infection, he switched to using dead bacteria. Coley published the results of his work as a case series, making it difficult to interpret them with confidence. According to the American Cancer Society, "More research would be needed to determine what benefit, if any, this therapy might have for people with cancer".Cancer Research UK say that "available scientific evidence does not currently support claims that Coley's toxins can treat or prevent cancer". People with cancer who take Coley's toxins alongside conventional cancer treatments, or who use it as a substitute for those treatments, risk seriously harming their health.
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