Moss on Coley's Toxins

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From the Moss newsletter. Interesting . . .

From: subscribe@...(Cancer Decisions News Staff)

Date: Sun, Apr 19, 2009, 11:12am (CDT+5)

Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D. Weekly CancerDecisions.com

Newsletter #388 04/19/09

ANNOUNCING REPORT ON COLEY'S TOXINS

This week I am proud to announce publication of my latest online report,

Coley's Toxins: The Sum of Our Hope. Coley's toxins were-and are-among

the most promising cancer treatments ever devised. They have existed in

one form of another for over 100 years. But since the 1960s they have

been effectively banned in the United States, although they are still

available in several other countries (including Mexico and Germany).

What exactly are Coley's toxins (also called mixed bacterial vaccine)?

They are a powerful stimulator of the immune system made up of the

killed byproducts (or " toxins " ) of two potent bacteria. The first of

these is Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes the skin disease

erysipelas among other illnesses. The other is Serratia marcescens

(formerly known as Bacillus prodigiosus), which potentiates the action

of other bacteria and has independent anticancer activity.

After observing that the skin disease erysipelas sometimes triggers the

" spontaneous " regression of tumors, B. Coley, MD (chief of the

bone cancer service at what is now Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer

Center in New York) began to use a killed mixture of bacteria in the

treatment of cancer. For many years, Coley's toxins were manufactured by

the Parke- Co. and were accepted by the American Medical

Association (AMA). After Coley's death in 1936, his son, Bradley,

inherited his practice and continued to use the toxins until the early

1960s. But after passage of strict new amendments to the Food and Drug

Act, the FDA refused to " grandfather " Coley's treatment (i.e., accepted

them as a long-established part of medicine, as they did, for instance,

with aspirin) but banned it as a " new drug. " This " new drug " was at that

time almost 75 years old.

This brand new 100-page report, with its many illustrations and 285

footnotes, contains the full story of one of the greatest unsung heroes

of modern medicine. B. Coley devised what was arguably the first

effective non-surgical treatment for cancer and used it on over 1,000

patients between 1892 and 1936. The outcomes in these cases were

meticulously documented by his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, in a series

of 20 or so disease-specific monographs.

The Coley story is a human drama of the greatest importance in

understanding the struggle between the conventional and alternative

trends in cancer research. It is also a collective tragedy, since this

promising treatment was effectively destroyed by a branch of the US

government, the FDA, and is not widely known, researched or used today.

I first became aware of Coley's toxins in 1974 when I interviewed

Kanematsu Sugiura, DSc, who had been Coley's colleague at Memorial

Hospital in the 1920s. In the following year I interviewed Mrs. Nauts at

her apartment on New York's Park Avenue. I wrote a chapter on B.

Coley in my first book, The Cancer Industry (1980).

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But since then a great deal of valuable new information has emerged

about Coley's heroic struggle to establish this unusual treatment. In

preparation for this new report I interviewed some of the world's

experts on Coley's toxins and elicited their thoughts on the safety and

effectiveness of this treatment. I believe that the basis now exists for

reevaluating Coley's results and reviving what was best in his methods.

It is a great pleasure for me to publish a full account of Coley's

toxins, which will undoubtedly come as a revelation to readers who

suspect that there are more promising treatments available than the

limited options that are usually offered by standard oncology.

ADVANCE COMMENTS ON RALPH MOSS' COLEY'S TOXINS: THE SUM OF OUR HOPE

" I found Ralph Moss's report on the work of Dr. B. Coley

fascinating. I agree that Coley's procedure should be re-investigated,

particularly in well controlled clinical trials, so that it can be

appraised properly once and for all. "

-Jacques , MD, PhD, FRS, discoverer of the immunological function

of the thymus and of the two major subsets of lymphocytes (T cells and B

cells)

" This is a must-read for cancer patients, physicians and cancer

researchers. As usual, Ralph Moss has done an excellent job explaining a

complicated and tragic history that has for too long been ignored by

those responsible for public health. In the treatment of cancer, there

is nothing on the medical horizon more important than the work of

Coley. "

-Don MacAdam, chief executive officer, MBVax Bioscience, Inc.

" In Coley's Toxins, Ralph Moss completes the recuperative historical

project begun in his classic book, The Cancer Industry. For the first

time we have a comprehensive history of over a century of research on

the bacterial vaccine therapy.... If enough people join with Ralph Moss

in demanding that the undone science gets done, we may well find that a

safe, affordable, and efficacious treatment for cancer has been

available for over a hundred years. "

- J. Hess, PhD, Professor of Science and Technology Studies,

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

" Despite my many years of research on Dr B. Coley, Ralph Moss

has revealed many new insights into who Coley was, the challenges he

faced in establishing immunology as a new treatment for cancer, and what

his work will mean in the future for patients with cancer. "

- A. Hoption Cann, PhD, University of British Columbia

Coley's Toxins: The Sum of Our Hope :

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