In 1885, a German refugee named Fred Stein
was being treated at New York Hospital
for a cancer on his neck
and this was the fourth operation
and the cancer had come back and was now
spreading all over his body.
In the hospital, Mr. Stein
developed a skin disease, a skin infection
called erysipelas
and he almost died. He had high fevers
he had chills, he had
reddening of the face and of the skin.
But a remarkable thing happened
that when he was cured of the erysipelas
the cancer was gone.
They made note of this in the records
but they dismissed him from the hospital
and then he went home to lower Manhattan
where he lived.
Seven years later, when William B. Coley
was trying to find some cure
or some effective treatment for sarcoma,
he looked through all the records of New York
Hospital
and every patient who had that extensive disease
had died
except for this one remarkable case
but nobody knew what happened to Fred K. Stein
and so he went searching for him.
He had a picture of Stein
and eventually, he found him
living near City Hall in Manhattan
and the man was completely free of cancer.
William B. Coley was actually curing cases
of cancer
in the period from 1893 to 1933
that are not considered curable today.
You can see people with very advanced disease
I mean, on the point of death
who were rescued through the
aggressive use of a fever-causing mixture
of killed bacteria,
and we can't give that treatment to them in
the United States.
It's been banned since 1963.
Please welcome this year's laureate, Jim Allison.
Hello.
Thank you Dr. Smith, and Mr. President...
We can say the word cure...
I mean, not lightly
because there are people who relapse
early on, but
somewhere close to 60 percent of patients
have complete responses.
You still can't find a single
good clinical trial of Coley's toxins
even though
Coley was curing cancer,
advanced, stage four cancer
a hundred years ago.
And so, certainly, there's no pharmaceutical
company
that will fund a study like that.
The economical system is always
a company has a virus, a patent for that
and then they do the trial.
Around 70 new immunotherapies
made it to the market.
These are mainly all drugs.
These are mainly all targeted therapies.
The crazy thing is that
we are not allowed to show our data.
This is nuts.
The war on cancer has not been successful.
It's been an amazing journey
from the blacklist to the Nobel Prize.
My name is Ralph Moss.
I am a science writer.
I have written almost exclusively about cancer
since 1974.
I was hired at that time as
the science writer for
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
There were some treatments
and particularly, laetrile,
a derivative of apricot kernels,
that our research had shown to be positive
and my employers, at that time
chose to lie about the results of these experiments
and so I exposed that
and was fired, of course, on the next day
after I held a press conference about this.
So, I have a great interest in
the question of so-called alternative treatments
but I am also very interested in the conventional
treatments as well. I mean I don't really
see the world as divided up in that way.
There are only
effective and ineffective treatments.
Even 40 years ago
I understood that the great hope of
cancer treatment was with the immune system.
This is the great untold story in cancer therapy,
the story of William B. Coley
and what happened to his treatment.
The biggest cover-up in cancer
is the cover-up of
the effectiveness of Coley's toxins
and that 100 years ago
at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
they had as close as we've ever come to a
cure for cancer.
Starting in 1893,
Coley started to give a mixed bacterial vaccine
of killed bacteria
to cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Hundreds of people were cured of cancer
in the early part of the 20th century.
What happened?
Why didn't this become universally known
and universally accepted?
You had the rise of radiation therapy
and then later, chemotherapy
and these put big industrial players
into the field of cancer research.
And so, the Coley's toxins were incredibly
inexpensive to produce
and they couldn't compete commercially
with radium, or radiation equipment
or especially with chemotherapy.
In 1963, against vehement objections
from the Coley family
the Food and Drug Administration refused to
grandfather in Coley's toxins.
It had been an approved medication and then
they
they went against their own rules and they
refused to
allow it to be sold anymore
in the United States, and this basically killed
it.
The American Cancer Society, in 1965
put Coley's toxins
on its Unproven Methods of Cancer Management
list and book
which was the most damning thing that
could happen to a cancer treatment.
Everything conspired against the Coley's toxins
and the leaders of Sloan Kettering
for many years
although they professed an interest
and a desire to have this story told,
in actuality, we know from
letters and papers in different archives
that they were working actively, behind the
scenes
to prevent any further research
into Coley's toxins.
My whole world was turned upside down
in 1975, by my association with
Helen Coley Nauts and Lloyd J. Old.
They were like, joined at the hip, Helen and
Lloyd.
They were kind of an odd couple
because Helen had no formal training in science
and Lloyd was, even then
one of the most eminent immunologists of his day.
Lloyd Old is, of course, one of my heroes.
Lloyd Old detected TNF Alpha
and I am making use of his work and his detection
every day of my life.
Lloyd Old's successor at the Cancer Research
Institute
is James P. Allison.
Lloyd, I first became aware of his work in the 60s
and I went to the library.
At that time, we actually had journals
books and stuff, you know?
And -- I read a lot about Lloyd's work, and
then about
T cells and the T cell receptor
and I decided that, first of all, I wanted
to unravel
the secrets of T cells.
I figured, when we
figured that out, that maybe we could
do something about cancer.
He said to me at one point
Do you want to know where we get all our new
ideas from?
And he got up, and walked behind me to the
bookshelf
in his office and took down a book, and then
handed it to me.
It was the American Cancer Society's book
Unproven Methods of Cancer Management
He said, here, this is the Bible.
Helen had no official position at Sloan Kettering
but she was the daughter of William B. Coley
and she had founded an organization called
the Cancer Research Institute.
Very prestigious and powerful research organizations
which are funding more than 150 post-doc trainings
yearly
and I was one of them.
So she was not a medical doctor, but she was
scientifically an extremely educated lady
with an honorary doctorate from Rockefeller
University.
They had together produced an amazing
body of work, mostly Helen's effort.
She wrote almost 20 monographs
which were like single-subject books
on her father's work with the Coley's toxins,
or Coley's fluid
and the successes were extraordinary.
You can go down the list of Helen's monographs
and see case after case after case
of people with dire disease
who then survived 30, 40, even 50 years after
that time.
These are almost completely unknown today.
I have the set that she gave me
with her own typed-in additions, and so forth
and I cherish this series of books
look at them almost every day
but almost nobody else knows about them.
People deny that there was any validity
to the immunotherapy.
Lloyd despaired of opposing the establishment
and so his thought was, well, let's
let's go to the root of the Coley's toxins
because we can't really prove -- in the modern
sense
through randomized controlled trials --
we can't really prove that Coley's toxins
work.
This was his view.
Coley died the year before the randomized
controlled trial
was even invented.
So let's do basic research.
Lloyd had directed 200 million dollars
in research funding toward cancer immunotherapy
and had recruited over 1,000 researchers into
the field.
So, when I then was introduced to Helen Coley
Nauts
a circle closed.
I really felt I'm back to the roots.
Immunology as we know it today
could never have developed as long as it was
being
stigmatized as a so-called
quack treatment, which it never was of course.
It was the most promising treatment that developed
up until the modern day.
Dr. Coley's daughter
established a research center in New York.
One of the major researchers and collaborators
of that lab
was Dr. James Allison.
In the 60s, when
certainly the idea of immune surveillance
came to the fore
and people began to think that
first of all, that's why we have an immune
system
which I think
is not true. I think that's demonstrably not
correct.
On the other hand,
we have an immune system
and it's demonstrably true that it does
have anti-tumor effects.
James P. Allison of the
MD Anderson Cancer Center
in Houston
is one of the greatest immunologists
in the world today.
He radically revised our understanding
of how the immune system relates to cancer
and he won the 2018 Nobel Prize
for his discovery of the first
immune checkpoint inhibitor drug, Yervoy.
This drug, as well as Opdivo
and Keytruda
have revolutionized the way in which cancer
is treated today.
They break the link between the cancer cell
and the immune cell
freeing up the immune system to attack and
kill cancer.
So a T cell is being controlled by those checkpoint
inhibitors.
That's what those Nobel Prize winners found
out
that these checkpoints can be blocked.
So we are blocking the blocking.
We are inhibiting the inhibitor.
We are breaking the break.
This woman I know was 22 years old
when she was diagnosed.
She had brain mets [metastases], liver mets,
lung mets, she had it everywhere.
And she was hospice-bound when she got ipi'd
[ipilimumab].
Her tumors went away.
That was fourteen years ago.
So she was one of the earlier people
but the doctor said, "You really should think
about not having babies"
and so for several years, she did that
and finally, after a while, she just said
"To hell with melanoma
I'm gonna have kids. I'm gonna live my life."
And she did. She said, "I'm having kids'"
so she's had two kids, and everybody's fine.
One of them is ten now I think, and the other
one's seven
or something like that. I saw them recently.
There's a woman from the Phase 1 trial of
ipi [ipilimumab]
from 2001.
She got a single dose, and she's still alive.
She's almost nineteen years out now
without any more treatment
without any recurrence.
This surgeon said, "Jim, Jim, Jim
you just can't use the word cure
because you know, cure means there's not a
single tumor cell
in the body
and we see spots on CAT scans
so you can't say that they're tumor-free."
But if you biopsy the tissue where that spot
is
when it's been done
there's never any cancer in it.
It's like a crater in the battlefield, you
know? It's
scar tissue where the fight was going on.
So it's a semantic question now. That doesn't
mean
there's not a few tumor cells, and I said
but remember, you're treating a patient, not
a CAT scan.
High-dose radiation, and high-dose chemotherapy
a lot of them, do obviously immunosuppress
people
but on the other hand
there have been a lot of studies recently
that show
that a lot of the chemotherapies don't work
all that well in animals that don't have immune
systems.
In other words, that there is an immune component
to even the chemotherapy.
So you kind of flipped oncology on its head.
The things that were the hardest to treat
now are the things that are most effectively
treated.
Yep. That's the way it seems.
I was so happy when
Doctor James Allison won the Nobel Prize last
year
and they found out that
yes, it has been a very
valid area, you know, a very valuable area
in treating the cancer patients.
I think Jim Allison has done something very
important.
And that's that he has
awakened the entire audience
both the healthcare practitioners
the oncologists, the patients.
He has awakened them to the concept
of immunotherapy for cancer
because for so many years
immunotherapy's been ignored. It's simply
cytotoxic chemotherapy.
We have to blast the cells, and we're going
to win the game
and we've had so many years to show that doesn't
work.
Keytruda has gotten a lot of popularity because
of
President Carter's melanoma.
In fact, they call it President Carter's treatment
because he was healed.
I will commonly use the checkpoint inhibitors
in low doses
in combination with other techniques
and actually achieve complete remission.
The problem with it sometimes is
that with this approach, and the way
checkpoint inhibitors work
you sometimes have no effect
sometimes just the right effect
and sometimes an overwhelming effect
and it's hard to predict.
Yeah, some people died in the early trials
because of ipilimumab, and
the reason was because we never saw
any adverse events in mice
except some vitiligo in melanoma
which was expected.
But we never saw anything else
no weight loss, no anything
and then gave them doses
ten times, hundred times as high
and for six months straight, you know
no adverse events whatsoever
and then it goes into people, and bam, you
know, there's stuff.
And I think the reason is that the mice
are kept absolutely as clean as we can keep
them.
Most people have had thousands of infections,
and so
it's easy to --
I think what's going on is just complex.
Very quickly, like with any drug
the physicians who used it developed algorithms
for treating it, so
almost nobody dies
of the colitis anymore, that was what killed
people early on.
But what appears now, is there is a correlation
between adverse events and response.
So in other words
if you have an adverse event, you're more
likely
to have a satisfactory outcome.
There are many, many links
between the early development
of Mrs. Nauts and Lloyd Old
and the current acceptance of immunotherapy.
The Cancer Research Institute
which is a thriving organization today
has only had two scientific directors
Lloyd Old and James Allison.
Jim Allison won the William B. Coley Award.
His wife, Pam, also independently won
the William B. Coley Award.
Jim Allison is the chairman of the Scientific
Board
of the Cancer Research Institute
which was founded to promote William B. Coley's
work.
With Coley's toxins
taking two specific bacteria,
we kind of set the immune system on fire,
and say, Go
and then we sit back and wait and see what
happens.
And to be honest, we're doing some similar
things
with the checkpoint inhibitors.
There's virtually no research going on
into the Coley's toxins, per se
and the position of the Cancer Research Institute
is that modern immunotherapy
such as the immune checkpoint inhibitors
are better than Coley's toxins.
So why would we bother
to use the Coley's toxins?
One of the obstacles to using checkpoint inhibitors
is cost.
The immune checkpoint inhibitors cost
on average, about $150,000 per patient.
The actual cost of the treatment could run
as high as one million dollars per person.
Typically, insurance won't pay
and then you have to say to the patient,
either you're going to pay out of pocket
or it's not going to happen.
Now, if you take a poor country
like Peru,
there's data to show that these new
immunotherapy treatments
could only reach five percent of the population
in Peru
and can only reach 10 percent of the population
in the richest country in Latin America.
90 percent of humanity is going to be
left out of this equation.
The Coley's toxins,
it would cost
with good manufacturing processing,
it would cost one or two thousand dollars
to create enough Coley's toxins to treat each
individual.
I had a researcher tell me,
she said, "I could make this stuff in my sleep."
Every country in the world could make it.
There's no patent on it.
In the light of what we know
about Coley's toxins
it's only reasonable
that some people would want to get
immune therapy independent of
American academic institutions.
In the 1970's, there were several clinics
that were already administering
immunotherapy in the United States.
The most famous of these
was the clinic of Dr. Lawrence Burton
in Freeport, Bahamas.
Because I had gone down to that clinic
and had written fairly favorably about it,
I was asked by 60 Minutes
to comment on Dr. Burton's treatment.
This treatment was similar in some ways to
immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy
but was never given the recognition
that it deserved.
Yet it remains a treatment
of tremendous interest today
and a model for many things that have come
since then.
Now, there are clinics
around the world
that do immunotherapy
for individuals
and they've been in business for decades
and we're interested in exploring these
as well as understanding what kind of results
they get
and what methods they use.
The German-speaking part of Europe
is a world center
for the treatment of cancer
with non-conventional methods
including immunotherapy.
We perform a brand new treatment
which is called Immunopheresis for cancer.
We are removing something from the patient's
body.
This is the new thing about it.
We are not giving something, we are removing
something.
We were looking for a nice place
where we could treat patients on a private
basis
and we found this beautiful property
here in Southern Bavaria
directly located at Lake Chiemsee
and we fell in love with it.
And we said this is where we have to treat
patients
because this is a place where they can get
well.
I was always keen in
applying natural medicine
which I can do at the moment
because what we do is absolutely natural.
We don't use any chemotherapy at all.
We apply a subtractive therapy
where we remove something really
which is made by the patient's body.
We're just removing natural things
and the patient is enabled again to detect
their own cancer in their body
and destroy it.
There are blocking factors, inhibitors you
can call them
in the patient's blood
and they really protect the cancer cells
and we know that these receptors are
in the patient's plasma.
So therefore, we have to figure out a way
to get to this plasma
and we found a way to remove them effectively.
We have a machine
and there's a filter in this machine
and the filter has a lot of membranes in them
and these membranes have little pores in them.
The formed blood particles stay inside the
membrane
and the non-formed blood particles
which also include the [soluble shed] receptors
they can be pressed through the membrane.
We're kind of washing the patient's blood
and therefore the immune system is enabled
again
to attack the cancer directly in the entire
body.
This is a process which takes place over several
hours.
The patient then has a break
and the absorber is regenerated in the lab
and then it can be reused again.
Because of its immunological approach
the treatment can work on all kinds of different
cancers.
I have breast cancer discovered in 2008
and I came here with stage four cancer, breast
cancer
with metastases.
Well, my typical day is like this
I wake up, I take my tea.
It takes one minute to get to the treatment.
Kiran connects me to our healing device.
We call him Karl.
After four or five hours
I am working on the computer
I can read, listen to audiobooks, etcetera.
I can do all the things without any problem.
Then we, what -- it finishes, I go home.
That is all.
It's very soft
without any problems.
Well, I tremble. It's cold sometimes.
If the patient has the first treatment
they can have some shivering and some cold
feeling
really like, if you have Coley's toxins
like you have an immune response.
So I put -- Kiran brings me hot water.
They can have an elevated temperature
and sometimes there is
trembling, uncontrollable.
They can feel probably something.
If they have liver mets [metastases], they
might feel something
or bone mets, they might feel something
they might have some increased pain for that.
Then we put a little bit of relaxing thing.
That is all we use.
There are very, very few side effects
and these side effects are actually not side
effects
they are actually wanted immune effects.
About side effects --
just let me see --
No, I don't. We don't have side effects.
No, only positive effects.
This in comparison with checkpoint inhibitors
is amazing.
We saw some impressive results
which convinced us to take
this technology a step further.
We wanted to really get it out of
the research section
and to do this in Europe
you have to get a so-called CE mark
Certificat Européen
that actually shows that
your technology is safe and effective.
Once you have that
you can market and sell
the technology in entire Europe
and certain countries like
the Emirates, or other countries which acknowledge
the CE mark.
Universities, some major universities
are collaborating with us
and also some other German clinics have committed
to this
but at the moment, it's only available here.
I think what we have found is
probably more significant than we can imagine
now.
Nobody believes this, you know, they say
hey, wait a minute, this is not possible.
But we can show it.
Fever is the ability of a human being to
react to three things
a virus, a bacteria, or a cancer cell.
That's it.
The idea behind everything is to
understand the difference between
chronic malignant inflammation
and the ability to raise an acute inflammatory
response
which is fever.
We should be able to develop fever
natural fever.
Somebody who tells me he or she hasn't had
fever in
20 years... I'm healthy, I'm never...
Not good.
I wish everybody of us
including myself
would have a fever
one time, one day
every one or two years
is enough.
And if you ask
ten thousand cancer patients, hey, tell me
about
your fever history
the majority, 9,900 would say
Fever? What is this? I have no idea what that
is.
So the missing history of fever
and the incidence of cancer is directly correlated.
I wrote books about that.
Nobody is interested because you can't patent
fever.
The backbone of the therapy, of course here
is hyperthermia and immunotherapy.
They generate mild fever
inside of the tumor tissue but also in the
whole body.
What we now discovered, is that we
integrate a way to create a natural fever
in a human being
with a drug called Interleukin-2
which is originally developed to stimulate
the
T cell response
a very powerful drug, a very dangerous drug,
and, we have repurposed it.
We have literally shown
this drug can be safely administered
under very careful monitoring.
In 
my lifetime, I will be able to initiate studies
which will not only in large case series
like we are doing right now
but in prospective trials
we will show that this treatment
is safe and effective.
Most doctors had no idea what we could do
against cancer with immunotherapy
and over the years, we learned
that the cancer is part of the immune system.
I started in 1986.
I did conventional oncology
and I saw a low success rate.
We give chemo, chemo, chemo
and the promise
that it could improve cancer
was really only for a short time.
Let's say a typical patient
a breast cancer patient with metastases
coming to us
the first step is seeing whether she has
enough white blood cells, enough monocytes
enough hemoglobin, and enough platelets.
The white blood cells are the immune system
and a part of the white blood cells are the
monocytes.
Then we separate the monocytes
and then we fractionate them.
We give a lot of infusions
that bring down inflammatory processes.
Also, we combine local hyperthermia
with the dendritic cells.
So the combinations make it
more likely to have a success.
Newcastle disease, the first use was 1905
but we have nowadays other viruses
which are even more successful than this.
We choose animal viruses.
And, mostly animal virus for vaccination of
animals
birds -- for chicken. Farmers have it on their
shelves.
And in human beings
we can't get the disease. The Newcastle disease
is a bird disease.
The tumor gets the infection, not the healthy
cells.
You are also getting very beautiful discrimination.
One activated killer cell can kill 200,000
tumor cells.
If you resect the tumor
and give immediately after the surgery the
vaccine
the survival rate is fantastic.
We're talking about 80 to 100 percent survival.
Cancer
is the result of a chronic inflammatory process.
When there is no inflammation -- no cancer.
First of all, I am treating cancer patients.
So, understanding more about the immune system
is the possibility of really curing
not only treating symptoms.
Due to many factors
including the fear of lawsuits
there are far fewer immunological cancer clinics
in the United States than there are in Europe.
Despite that, several doctors have established
clinics
in the United States that fight cancer
by stimulating the immune system.
About sixteen years ago
my mother walked into the emergency department
when I was working
and I diagnosed her with
metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.
At the time, I didn't know anything about
treating cancer
other than the emergency management
of a crisis in the emergency department
but that was the point at which my life changed.
I started studying cancer
and now my career is
treating patients with advanced-stage cancer.
I actually consider myself a cancer scientist
and I am not the alternative doctor.
I am not a doctor who thinks I'm just going
to cure you
by using herbs
by using strictly non-conventional techniques.
I look at myself as someone who
looks at the science, looks at the data
and will consider using anything and everything
that potentially has efficacy
based on the data.
I offer them a comprehensive regimen
and that comprehensive regimen
approaches, or I approach the treatment
using multiple modalities.
I do often use chemotherapy.
However, instead of using maximum tolerated
dose chemotherapy
I use low-dose metronomic chemotherapy.
And so low-dose metronomic chemotherapy
is the concept of using low-dose chemotherapy
in a more frequent fashion, on a regular basis
without breaks
as opposed to maximum tolerated dose chemotherapy.
Now with low-dose metronomic chemotherapy
generally, the dose is not high enough
to get much cell kill
whether we're talking cancer cells or non-cancer
cells.
Rather, it works in other ways
through actually stimulating an immune response
as opposed to inhibiting an immune response.
So it is a gentler approach
but not only a gentler approach
but an approach that makes more sense.
Really, some of the, what we call chemotherapy
drugs
can be used as immunotherapy.
Another modality that I use
is the concept of repurposed drugs for oncology.
There are many drugs that have been developed
over the years
whose indication is for another purpose.
Antibiotics of course, are drugs
that are created to kill bacteria
but just like they inhibit bacteria
they can inhibit the ribosomes in cancer cells.
They can inhibit
what's called mitochondrial biogenesis
or the development of more mitochondria
for the cancer cells.
So the mechanisms through which they inhibit
cancer growth
are analogous to inhibiting bacteria.
There are a number of publications
showing that doxycycline
in appropriate dosages
selectively targets cancer stem cells.
Many antibiotics can be repurposed
to treat cancer.
No substance is inherently toxic or benign.
It depends on the dosings.
I can take a large amount of snake venom
and inject someone, and will kill them fairly
quickly.
On the other hand, if I use a tiny amount
of snake venom
I can stimulate an immune response.
I have patients who don't want chemotherapy
and I tell them I'm going to give them a
low-dose metronomic cyclophosphamide
and they say, No, I don't want chemotherapy
and I have to explain to them that
in low dose
it's not high enough to kill any cells
not cancer cells or your normal cells
but it will inhibit T regulatory cells
to turn on an immune response.
So there are many different substances that
we use
to immune modulate.
Certainly, I would like more freedom
to go one step further
but I can not do that right now.
Since the ancient times
since the time of Hippocrates
they always believed that the immune system
is important.
Those days, they didn't know how to explain
about the immune system.
We have a motto here, that
Hitting cancer with everything we've got.
We could help you, we could help you throughout
the disease
if you try to see
an open-minded oncologist who's going to help
you
with finding a path to go
like, you could do this using some of the
standard treatments
but try to do it personalized
and then we will help you to go through that.
A lot of times, they change their mind.
So I like to let the patients know that
they are not dying
and they've got to sit down
they've got to relax.
They've got to try to find the best way
to fight with the cancer
and they may live a long, long, long life.
We have always looked at the cancer
as a bacteria
or as a virus
as something from outside.
And they have tried to destroy it, to eradicate
it
with surgery
chemotherapy
radiation
and unfortunately, a lot of times
the treatment has been worse than the disease.
It's about four decades
of the time that, War on Cancer was
announced by President Nixon
and with all the money that's been spent
in the cancer field
unfortunately, we are still having
lots of people who are dying with cancer.
In fact, according to the
statistics from the World Health Organization
they are saying that in 2018
there were 18.1 million cancer patients
and that half of these people died in 2018.
The War on Cancer has not been successful.
A lot of people died
prematurely with the side effects of the treatment
rather than the disease.
And unfortunately, that has made
a lot of people not to go to standard medicine.
It was basically chemotherapy
that destroyed Coley's toxins
because chemotherapy is a multi-billion dollar
business.
Coley's is an inexpensive treatment.
It can't be patented
so there's no way that the Coley's toxins
can compete in the marketplace
because the drug companies just have no interest
in it.
After World War II
the combination of the chemotherapy
and the radiation therapy
gradually eclipsed the importance of immunotherapy.
And it became dogma from then on
that this is the way we should treat cancer.
For most cancers, we don't really have evidence
that chemotherapy is curative
for advanced cancers.
They may have success in the first few weeks.
They will see that the cancer
load is going to be less
and the tumor is going to shrink
and when there is a shrinkage of the tumor
by 50 percent
they call it a success.
They call it, 'This treatment has been successful.'
But again, regardless of how long it's going
to last.
Now unfortunately, with this kind of treatment
the cancer will recur.
Maximum tolerated dose
simply kills every cell that's rapidly dividing
whether it's your normal tissue, or the malignant
tissue.
It doesn't decipher.
Well, we've had many, many years
to treat solid tumors with
maximum tolerated dose chemotherapy
and it doesn't work any better now
than it did almost 70 years ago.
When I started with immunotherapies in 2001
there was little around
just a few specialized clinics were performing
these treatments.
In those days, mainstream was really
still chemotherapy
of course surgery
and radiation.
These were really the drugs and treatments
which were available.
In Germany, we were always
a little bit more freer to do our things.
Big pharma was already working on immunotherapies.
Because they had learned at that time that
chemo was not really the solution to all the
problems.
Patients were not happy with it anymore.
People were really in those days looking for
new solutions.
And, what my hope would be, that one day
we wouldn't have to have
chemotherapy at all anymore.
Hyperthermia, also called heat therapy
is the use of special devices
to kill cancer cells.
Hyperthermia is similar to Coley's toxins
in the sense that it uses temperature
to trigger an immune response against the
disease.
There are two techniques
one is the whole-body hyperthermia
and the local hyperthermia is very simple.
There is an aerial [antenna].
This aerial gives 13.5 MHz waves
through the body.
And that is a wavelength that
has a resonance with tumor cells.
They get heated up.
The rest of the tissue has no resonance
so you get a hot tumor
and that makes an advantage to presenting
better antigens.
It's in widespread use around the world.
but much less in the US or the UK than in
most other countries
I would love to use
hyperthermia the way it's being used in Germany.
The devices that really can achieve
temperatures
40 degrees centigrade (104º Fahrenheit)
they're not approved here
and I'm certainly not comfortable
using it here.
We can do that in a local fashion
so not systemically, not throughout the entire
body
but in particular areas where people have
tumor
to approximately 106 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit.
When you apply it over time to a tumor
you get various changes
that make the other therapies work better
and also affect the tumor in a primary fashion.
The infrared sauna is just beautiful.
We have two sets of that.
We try to raise their core body temperature.
We get a lot of benefits of that.
Again, number one
it's going to be relaxing them
and number two, because the heat
especially when we go
close to 102º F or 103º F
which is safe for the healthy cells
but could be weakening the cancer cells
that will boost the immune system.
So we use the tent for them
they love it, they lay down
and still get the benefit of hyperthermia.
I feel that we are ready
to take what we have found to the next dimension
and that is of course clinical studies.
Really, the next step
which is a huge leap
is in some fashion
to individualize treatment.
Diagnosis comes first --
before we develop a treatment plan
which is, and has to be
individualized for each and every patient
all the time, always
we have to review very, very carefully
the often longstanding
up to ten-year history
of every cancer patient.
This is something I learned from Lloyd [Old]
he had a lot of phrases and things
that "If you don't learn from every patient
you're doing them a disservice, and the field
a disservice."
Every single person is different
and their diseases are different.
Even if they have the same disease
that doesn't mean that we should approach
them the same way.
Because cancer is a unique disease
to every individual
and it's a dynamic disease that's constantly
changing.
Look precisely at the patient.
What is really going on?
And then according to that
program the cells.
Therefore, a so-called standard
is not possible.
You have got standard human beings and standard
patients
but such a creature never crossed my steps.
I've had only individuals
so, I treat
each patient according
to the need
for that patient, not for the statistics.
Standard oncology
is giving you
one or several chemotherapy agents.
Everyone who has that particular cancer
is going to be treated the same.
So, if we want to
help the patient
we have to practice precision oncology.
Until we actually come to grips with
leaving this paradigm of
‘This is your cancer, this is your treatment’
we're not going to make great changes.
Unique treatments for each individual --
that's --
that's the home run.
Immunotherapy to me
is still what somebody called
the sum of all our hopes.
We know, we've known as a civilization
as a society, we've known from at least the
14th century
that sometimes cancers disappear on their
own.
I say on their own
you know, in the 14th century, they thought
this came through divine intervention.
But over time
we realized that it was more frequently associated
with
bacterial infections
and this is how Coley got into the field
because he found a patient
who had, quote unquote, cured himself
of advanced cancer
by getting an infection
but instead of dying, the man was cured
healed with no treatment
and the cancer went away.
Immunotherapy is an attempt
to harness that phenomenon
of the spontaneous remission
in the service of humanity.
The whole immunotherapy rise
of cancer nowadays
is based on Coley's discovery.
In the last ten years
immunotherapy has really taken off
and a lot has entered the market.
There is a lot of hope for a lot of patients.
We're learning more about it, the pros and
cons.
We're seeing responses but
we are also seeing the negative aspects
of checkpoint inhibitors.
There will be hope that there will be the
combination
of immunotherapies
that they can work hand in hand.
If we get lucky, if we are successful
if everything goes well
one day, cancer will be a chronic disease
and not a killer anymore.
My dream was always
that somebody comes to the doctor with a stomach
ache.
The doctor takes a specimen
and sends it to the pathologist.
Two weeks later, the patient has
an appointment with the doctor
and the doctor says to the patient
Mr. Miller, you are lucky. You have only stomach
cancer.
You get some viruses
and some cells, and then we cure it.
I see that.
At the end of the tunnel, I see light
that we can get that.
We are comfortable with what we know
and that's what we've done for so many years.
So it takes a long time
for another idea to actually come to fruition.
Now, the way this game is played
is this other idea
has to translate into
a monetary pharmacologic win.
We need to turn oncology treatment on its
head
and say it's time to be able to have the freedom
to think again.
We need to do customized cancer treatment
educate the patients
use the appropriate alternative medicine
pay attention to their epigenetics
and anything which helps them
especially with their immune system.
I do believe that
we are going to be a winner
in the field of cancer in the future.
If you can show what we can show
we will be successful, you know.
There's nothing better
for something new than an idea
which makes sense
and this idea makes sense.
I would say that it was a battle royal
within the highest echelons of American medicine
over which direction
cancer treatment was going to go in.
We're only now figuring out
how to extract the best of what Coley demonstrated
with this amazing work that Jim Allison
and his colleagues have done.
Put those together
that's the sum of all our hopes
in terms of curing cancer.
