History of immunotherapy: William Coley is the grandfather of immunotherapy. A surgeon in New York between 1870 and 1910, he developed extracts of streptococcus and another bacterium called Serratia marcescens (known as Coley’s toxins) to treat patients, particularly children, with sarcoma. The responses were spectacular, extending long-term survival rates by as much as 40%.
Unfortunately to this day, nobody has quite been able to replicate what that Coley was doing. However, the news of Coley’s work crossed the Atlantic and in the era before the First World War, immunotherapy was something that was being widely researched in the UK with regards to the treatment of infectious disease. The theory was that if you could use, for example, convalescent serum from somebody who survived an infectious disease and put it into somebody who still had the disease, it gave some very good results.…
