Cancer vaccines are showing promise at last

From The Economist

Towards the end of the 19th century William Coley, a surgeon in New York, made a surprising observation. One of his patients, close to death with a neck tumour, recovered after catching a serious bacterial skin infection. Intrigued, Coley tried to replicate the finding, injecting patients with a cocktail of killed bacteria to get their cancers to regress. He ended up treating over a thousand patients in this way, often successfully.

Coley’s reasoning was that infection could trigger the immune system to fight cancer. That idea, controversial during his lifetime, would not become more widely accepted by scientists until the 1950s. Today it is driving efforts to create a new generation of therapies known as “cancer vaccines” that aim to train the immune system to recognise tumours and fight their spread. Trials are now under way against cancers found everywhere from the skin and ovaries to the brain and lungs. After half a century of disappointing dead ends, promising results are starting to emerge.