William Coley
William Bradley Coley ( born January 12, 1862 in Westport, Connecticut, † April 16, 1936 in New York City ) was an American bone surgeon and oncologist. He is regarded as the "father of cancer immunotherapy ".
Life
Coley studied from 1880 to 1884 at Yale College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts. Afterwards he learned two years of Latin and Ancient Greek at Bishop Scott Government School in Portland (Oregon ). In 1886 he went to the Harvard Medical College. Two years later he graduated as M.D. his studies and in 1889 assistant at the Hernia Clinic. In 1891 he began to work intensively with cancer. In 1892 he joined the New York Cancer Hospital, now known as Memorial Sloan -Kettering Cancer Center. In January 1925 he became chief surgeon at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (now the Hospital for Special Surgery ). In 1933, he went into retirement due to illness. Three years later he died a day after surgery for diverticulitis.
Coley was in 1891 married to Alice, nee Lancaster. With it, Coley had a son ( Bradley Lancaster Coley ) and a daughter ( Helen Lancaster Coley, Helen Coley Nauts later ). Alice Coley died seven months after her husband.
Coley's contribution to cancer immunotherapy
Coley had heard of a cancer patient in whom there was ( a bacterial infection of the upper layers of the skin and lymph vessels ) to a complete remission after a high fever, caused by erysipelas. Coley found in my research that Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and Emil von Behring had described similar cases after erysipelas. In 1891, he injected a cancer patient - an Italian immigrant, mid 30's, which is already behind and after the forecast only a few weeks had two operations after recurrence in front of him - the erysipelas bacteria of the genus Streptococcus pyogenes directly into the tumor. Coley repeated injections over several months and the tumor regressed to the patient. The patient survived for eight years. Later Coley used a mixture ( Coley 's toxin) of killed bacteria of species Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens, together with the still active endotoxins, directly into tumors. In soft tissue sarcomas Coley reached with his method the remarkable cure rate of 10%. The response rates were very different and the side effects significantly. With the development of radiation therapy and advances in chemotherapy became Coley 's toxin largely forgotten.
The William B. Coley Award ( William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology ) bears since 1993 Coley's name and is awarded annually for achievements in the field of cancer immunology.