William Bradley Coley was an American bone surgeon and cancer researcher best known for his early contributions to the study of cancer immunotherapy.
19 Facts About William Coley
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Today, William Coley is recognized as the Father of Cancer Immunotherapy for his contributions to the science.
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William Coley was born on January 12,1862, in Saugatuck, a neighborhood of Westport, Connecticut.
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William Coley's parents were Horace Bradley Coley and Clarina B Wakeman.
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William Coley received his bachelor's degree in Classics from Yale University and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1888.
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In 1890, William Coley began his first year of private practice at New York Hospital and met Elizabeth Dashiell, a 17-year-old patient who would later go on to inspire William Coley to search for better methods of treating sarcoma.
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Dashiell visited William Coley after suffering from a hand injury which he soon discovered to be an aggressive bone tumor.
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William Coley was distressed that even modern medicine's customary procedure still could not save the life of one of his first patients.
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William Coley then decided to take the search for new possible treatments into his own hands, soon becoming one of the medical community's model clinician-scientists.
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Curious to discover the reason for the man's remission, William Coley decided to search for the hospital's discharged patient, who he eventually found in Manhattan with no trace of cancer left in his body.
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William Coley found that his suspicion was not a new one in oncology.
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William Coley had even found cases that aligned almost exactly with the Fred Stein's malignant tumor.
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Two years after Zola's initial treatment, William Coley treated ten more of his own patients with the same live streptococcus bacteria.
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William Coley had arranged for a wealthy friend to provide funds to purchase two x-ray machines for his use.
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However, after several years of experience, William Coley came to the conclusion that the effect of that primitive x-ray therapy in the untrained hands of experimenters was localized, temporary, and not curative.
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From its creation in 1893, to 1962 with the introduction of the Kefauver Harris Amendment, William Coley's toxins were being used to treat several types of cancers around the world.
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William Coley published the results of his work as a case series, making it difficult to interpret them with confidence.
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William Coley died on April 16,1936, at the age of 74 in the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled in New York City.
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William Coley was survived by his wife and two children who continuously worked after his death to preserve Coley's legacy in the field of cancer research.