Cancer vaccines are showing promise at last
Trials are under way against skin, brain and lung tumours
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.
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We analyse two centuries of scholarly work
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