| Germ Warfare The approval of the Merial vaccine is the culmination of a century-long quest that began when a pretty 17-year-old girl, Elizabeth Dashiell, entered a New York City doctor's office, complaining of pain in her wrist. The doctor, William Bradley Coley, 28, found cancer. In hopes of containing the disease, Coley amputated Dashiell's arm, but it was too late. Tumors soon popped up all over her body; she died in four months. Stunned, the young surgeon became obsessed with finding a cure. A year later, he was positive he had the answer: germs. In the weeks after Dashiell's death, Coley scoured 15 Coley plunged into the tenements of the Lower East Side, looking for Stein. After knocking on doors for weeks, Coley found himself face-to-face with this once-terminal patient, who was now robust, healthy, and cancer-free. This gave Coley an idea. He would inject the same germs that had made Stein sick and, presumably destroyed his tumors, into cancer patients. It was and insane notion. After all, in the days before penicillin, patients were more likely to die of infections than of anything else. Coley's superiors finally decided to let him try it, but only on a hopeless case. The patient, remembered only as Zola, had head-and-neck tumors so large he could neither eat nor drink, and his future was counted in days. In May 1891, Coley injected Zola's tumors with a special brew he had whipped up from some really nasty germs specially imported from Germany. Predictably, Zola became violently ill. But, to everyone's amazement, by the second day, the tumors appeared to be breaking down. Within two weeks, they were gone. Zola walked out of the hospital, and lived for nine more years. In the field of cancer immunology, the idea of harnessing the immune system to fight off malignancies was born. Coley refined his method, using toxins from killed bacteria instead of injecting the patient with live bugs. Using his potion, known as Coley's Toxins, he treated 430 hopeless cancer patients, reporting cures for 47, a remarkable result for late-stage cancer. But it was no scientific slam-dunk. Other doctors found the toxins difficult to use and unpredictable. And soon, the discovery of the X-ray and radium eclipsed all other cancer therapies, as the medical community embraced the new technique, and its Nobel Prize-winning creator, Madame Marie Curie, with a near-religious fervor. Coley stuck stubbornly with his germs and found himself on the outs with the scientific establishment. By the time he died in 1936, toxin treatments had joined the ranks of other 19th-century sure cures, such as placing live toads on skin tumors. Coley might well have become a bizarre scientific footnote had it not been for his daughter, Helen. She thought her father had gotten a raw deal, and spent decades organizing his research and looking for ways to prove he was right. In 1953, she found and organization, the Cancer Research Institute, that kept Coley's ideas alive into the age of molecular biology. With the tools of the new science, researchers were able to identify the minute changes that turn a normal cell into a malignant one, and to figure out ways to alert the immune system to the presence of these transformed cells. Today's vaccine against melanoma in dogs, which is now in early-stage clinical trials in humans, sprang from this research. Although they'll never know it, Bodo and Grace owe a great debt to a young girl named Bessie, who died more than 100 years ago. - Mara Bovsun - This article originally appeared in the April 2008 AKC Gazette |
years' worth of New York Hospital's cancer records. One patient piqued his curiosity. Fred Stein, a German immigrant, had undergone several operations for tumors on his head and neck some years earlier. The tumors kept coming back, and, soon, cancer had invaded his internal organs. Stein's doctors had given up hope, even before Stein's last surgery left him with a raging infection, known then as St. Anthony's fire – a quickly spreading strep. Against all odds, Stein's immune system fought off the infection and as if that were not miraculous enough, somehow his bout with St. Anthony's fire seemed to have wiped out his cancer. There was no sign of the disease anywhere in his body. Stein bid his perplexed doctors farewell, and was never seen at the hospital again. 
Other Vaccine Studies
Two veterinary schools are investigating melanoma vaccines that differ from Merial's. In the last decade, the University of Wisconsin has treated more than 600 dogs with and experimental vaccine based on canine melanoma cells grown in a laboratory.
Preliminary results of clinical trials seem promising. One showed increased immune response in a subset of dogs after treatment, said associate scientist Ilene Kurzman. Following up with 350 dogs, she found 27 percent of those who had a tumor at the beginning of treatment had a positive immune response. "In a few of those dogs, the tumor had completely disappeared. The median survival of dogs with a tumor at the start treatment was about 145 days. The median survival for dogs with no tumor present at the time they started treatment – either because the tumor was removed by surgery or had completely responded to radiation therapy – was about two and a half years."
At the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, Rowan Milner BVSc, chief of the oncology service, has discovered that a melanoma vaccine they developed can stimulate natural killer cells in the blood to kill melanoma cells in the laboratory. Clinical trials were encouraging.
"Our preliminary data seem to indicate that up to 45 percent of 60 dogs showed an immune reaction to the vaccine in the Phase I part of the trial," Milner said. "Rarely do advances in oncology occur in quantum leaps, but we think we are making a difference."
- This article originally appeared in the April 2008 AKC Gazette
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