The bacterium that preys on cancerous tumors

At the end of the 19th century, a man suffering from a sarcoma-type cancerous growth in the neck area arrived at the hospital in New York. Over the course of three years, the man underwent five surgeries in an attempt to remove the cancer cells from the area, but the tumor returned time and time again.

At the end of the 19th century, a man suffering from a sarcoma-type cancerous growth in the neck area arrived at the hospital in New York. Over the course of three years, the man underwent five surgeries in an attempt to remove the cancer cells from the area, but the tumor returned time and time again.

"In the last operation it was found that it was impossible to remove the entire tumor, and the case was considered hopeless." Dr. William B. writes. Coley in a study he published on the subject in 1893. But then the unexpected happened: two weeks after the last operation, the patient contracted a severe infectious disease known in Hebrew as 'shoshana' due to the red lesions spreading on the skin, and caused by harmful bacteria. During the illness, the tumor underwent a reversal that seemed almost miraculous.

"... the remnants of the sarcoma disappeared completely, the wound healed quickly, and myself and Dr. Bull [the surgeon - R.C.] saw the patient seven years later, and at that time the attached photo was taken."

Patient with sarcoma type cancer in the neck area. Diagnosed as having no chance of recovery, then he was 'treated' by bacteria, and managed to survive for many more years. source.

It must be admitted that the attached photo, which demonstrates the state of the body after recovery from cancer, is not pleasant to look at - but it is certainly better than the alternative.

The case aroused the curiosity of Cooley, who believed that the patient's immune system might have reacted strongly against the bacterial infection, and along the way also acted to eliminate the tumor. Another possibility was that the bacteria themselves secreted substances that killed the cancerous growth. Coley began injecting cancer patients with a combination of live, dead bacteria and extracts made from bacteria, in an attempt to treat the tumors. In the next forty years, he treated more than a thousand cancer patients using the unique mixture called "Coley's toxins".

The results spoke for themselves, apparently. In five hundred of Cooley's one thousand treatments, the cancerous tumors regressed and almost completely disappeared (HC & JR., 1990). We are only aware of this today thanks to the research of Cooley's granddaughter, a cancer researcher in her own right, who conducted a comprehensive review of his experiments. Cooley himself published his results scattered throughout his career, in a way that made it very difficult for the community of doctors and scientists to derive a complete and orderly theory from them. He was treated with disdain by the medical community, among other things due to his private beliefs that bacteria also cause cancerous tumors themselves, and the scientific community was alienated from his results because he failed to conduct a serious long-term study that isolated the effect of his toxins and differentiated them from other treatments those patients underwent, such as radiation and chemotherapy.

The research on "Coley's toxins" continued over the years, but had to deal with the increasing success of other treatment methods such as chemotherapy and radiation of the tumor. With the passage of time, Coley's toxins were abandoned by the wayside, remaining as an anecdote in the history of medical cancer research (McCarthy, 2006).

Until the last decade, when Cooley's theory returned to the headlines.

Anti-tumor bacteria

Since the year 2002, two clinical trials have been conducted in which salmonella bacteria (Salmonella typhimurium) were injected into the bloodstream of cancer patients (Toso, Rosenberg, & al, 2005; Thamm DH, XNUMX). The bacteria were pre-engineered so that they would not harm the body, for obvious reasons. Since the injected bacteria prefer to live in oxygen-free conditions, they naturally reached the tumor area and settled there, while causing damage to the cancer cells and attracting to the area the immune system cells that began to fight the tumor upon their arrival.

These clinical trials opened the door to the field of cancer treatments through bacterial infection, but their results were far from impressive. Since the bacteria were injected into the bloodstream, most of them failed to reach the tumor area and their effect on it was limited.

In a new study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a new way of introducing the bacteria into the body was tested, this time with a new type of bacteria different from those tried so far. In this case, the researchers used Clostridium nubia bacteria, which live in the soil and release toxins that are dangerous to the human body. Fortunately, these bacteria are particularly sensitive to oxygen and find it difficult to live well in body tissues that benefit from a continuous supply of oxygen from the blood. However, the living conditions inside the tumor are different from those in the other tissues: the tumor suffers from a low oxygen supply, so the Clostridium bacteria that reached it were supposed to be able to survive and even thrive inside it, while damaging the tumor and calling the white blood cells to the place.

To make sure that a large number of the bacteria reach the tumor, the researchers chose to inject the tiny organisms directly deep into the cancerous area. The procedure was first tried in tumors inside the brains of mice, with the researchers using genetically engineered bacteria to minimize their toxicity to the whole body. Within twenty-four hours, the bacteria began to thrive within the tumors, and the cancer cells dwindled in number. The bacteria settled inside the tumors themselves and avoided harming nearby healthy cells, thus eliminating only the few cancerous 'islands' in the healthy brain tissue. As a result, the mice that received the treatment survived 33 days, compared to mice that did not receive the treatment and survived only 18 days.

This is an impressive result, but treatment of mice is not comparable to treatment of larger animals. The researchers turned their attention to dogs with tumors genetically similar to those of humans. Out of 16 dogs that received the treatment, in six the tumor regressed significantly, and in three of them it disappeared completely.

So the researchers decided to raise the stakes, and resorted to performing the experiment on a human volunteer.

The voluntary victim was 53 years old when the experiment began, and had been suffering from cancer for eight years. She underwent several surgeries to remove tumors from her body, combined with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but to no avail. The cancer continued to spread in her body, and metastases were discovered in her liver, eyes, shoulder and arm. The researchers chose to inject ten thousand bacteria into the tumor in the shoulder area only, hoping to minimize the damage if the treatment causes such.

In retrospect, it was the right decision. The patient spent the week after the injection in severe agony, as her body tries to fight the bacterial infection. She suffered from high fever and pain that even painkillers injected directly into the bloodstream had difficulty completely preventing. But the suffering she went through was for a good purpose - to damage the tumor. And the tumor was indeed severely damaged. CT scans on the third day revealed massive destruction of the tumor tissue, and samples taken from the area on the fourth day showed a large presence of bacteria - but a complete absence of live cancer cells. The destruction was so rapid and sweeping, that the doctors had to drain the pus full of dead cells and decomposition products that formed in the tumor area. As of today, the patient is still suffering from the cancer in her body in general, but the effectiveness of the shoulder tumor treatment gives hope for the future.

Nevertheless…

In my books "The Guide to the Future" I wrote a lot about the great potential inherent in the use of 'biological' drugs or nanotechnologies: bacteria, viruses and other organisms that are genetically modified so that they perform certain actions inside the body, such as killing cancer cells. That's why my eyes lit up as soon as I read about the treatment with bacteria that destroy tumors. Nevertheless, it is impossible to talk about the current study without also referring to its problematic sides, and these are still many. The current experiment was conducted without controls and without patient groups (mice, dogs or humans) who did not receive the treatment. Because of this, it is difficult to know how significant the results are.

Beyond that, from reading the results it is clear that the patients suffer from severe side effects. In three of the dogs, the experiment was stopped due to the development of severe inflammation in the tumor area, which required the veterinarians to remove the entire tumor. Pus formed in the brains of the mice (due to the rapid decomposition of the cancerous tumors, and the action of the immune system) which needed to be drained, as was the case in the shoulder of the human patient. And this without even mentioning the severe pain that the participant in the experiment suffered during it.

Last but not least, the painful fact is that we do not even yet understand exactly how the bacteria work, and what is the way in which they eliminate the tumor. Are these toxins that the bacteria themselves secrete? Or maybe it is actually the increased activity of the immune system against the area of ​​the body where the bacteria are hiding? We just don't know.

All these data indicate that there is much more hidden than visible in this way of treatment, and even the researchers involved do not deny this. They understand for themselves that there is still a long way to an effective and regulated treatment of cancerous tumors through infection with bacteria and note this in the article. At the same time, this is another method that can enhance the existing treatment methods and function alongside them, and for that we can only congratulate, and hope that in the near future we will be able to engineer bacteria and viruses at a more advanced level, which will give us the weapons we need in the treatment of cancer and other diseases that attack humanity.

William Cooley has been waiting for these weapons for close to a hundred and twenty years.

I can wait a little longer.

References

HC, N', & JR., M'. (1990). Coley toxins–the first century. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 483 – 500.

McCarthy, E' F'. (2006). The Toxins of William B. Coley and the Treatment of Bone and Soft-Tissue Sarcomas. The Iowa Orthopedic Journal, 154 – 158.

Thamm DH, K' I'. (2005). Systemic administration of an attenuated, tumor-targeting Salmonella typhimurium to dogs with spontaneous neoplasia: phase I evaluation. Clinical Cancer Research, 4827 – 4834.

Toso, J' F', Rosenberg, S' A', & al, e'. (2002). Phase I Study of the Intravenous Administration of Attenuated Salmonella typhimurium to Patients With Metastatic Melanoma. American Society of Clinical Oncology, 142 – 152.