Zaharoff David A
IEEE Pulse. 2018 Jul-Aug;9(4):8-11. doi: 10.1109/MPUL.2018.2835578.
More than a century ago, the American surgeon William Coley noticed a correlation between cancer remissions and postoperative infections: some patients who had battled an infection also experienced a regression of their cancer. Because of these observations, Coley hypothesized that a patient's immune response to a bacterial infection could be leveraged to treat cancer. To test his hypothesis, Coley injected live bacteria into an inoperable tumor of one of his patients. The patient's tumor regressed, and Coley went on to experiment with direct injections of live, and later heat-killed, bacteria into more than a thousand patients over the next 40-plus years. Coley's toxins never achieved widespread clinical success due to concerns over reproducibility, although a strain of mycobacterium, bacillus Calmette-Guerin, is still routinely administered to treat early-stage bladder cancers.
一个多世纪以前，美国外科医生威廉·科利注意到癌症缓解与术后感染之间的关联：一些曾与感染作斗争的患者，其癌症也出现了消退。基于这些观察结果，科利推测患者对细菌感染的免疫反应可用于治疗癌症。为了验证他的假设，科利将活细菌注入一名患者无法手术切除的肿瘤中。该患者的肿瘤消退了，在接下来的40多年里，科利继续对1000多名患者进行了直接注射活细菌以及后来注射热灭活细菌的实验。由于对可重复性的担忧，科利毒素从未在临床上广泛取得成功，不过一种名为卡介苗的分枝杆菌菌株仍被常规用于治疗早期膀胱癌。
