014 - Three Cases of Probable Cancer Transplantation from the Use of the Gilman Vaccine

I skipped 1908 through 1910 because it was pretty much entirely just a big debate about the effectiveness of vaccine therapy, which I've already talked about enough, and since it isn't really used much today (if at all), it isn't in line with my goal of evaluating the safety and effectiveness of modern vaccines.

However, some such studies can be interesting and unique enough to be worth reading and writing about. This is one of them: a bit horrifying, actually.

While most people were trying to use vaccines and vaccine therapy for all kinds of different bacterial infections, some physicians in the Philippines, Gilman and Coca, had the idea of treating cancer with the same method: after removing a tumor, inactivating it somehow and injecting it back into the patient to stimulate an immune response against the material.

Unfortunately, the inactivation procedure apparently didn't always work, so the current series of case reports details several cancer patients who apparently experienced a sort of artificial metastasis when the tumor material injected into them started growing new tumors at the injection site.

The treatment itself sounded rather unpleasant: injection into the abdomen, sometimes with seizures as a side effect. But apparently the method used to inactivate the cancerous material before injection (5% phenol) was inadequate. Fortunately, it seemed like doctors received this article as a warning and were more careful in the future.

On the face of it, the treatment doesn't seem implausible. Cancer cells are different in some ways from healthy tissue, theoretically susceptible to immune attack, so inducing a stronger response against them might be helpful. People even now are trying to induce immune responses against certain cancers (see here). But it is very tricky, considering how similar cancer cells can be to healthy cells (they share the same ancestor cells, after all). It might be possible to cause some autoimmune disorders using this cancer vaccine therapy method, I would think, so it's probably best that it is no longer in use.

Citation: Coffey, W. B. Three Cases of Probable Cancer Transplantation from the Use of the Gilman Vaccine. Cal State J Med 9, 129–130 (1911).