© 2020 by Ralph W. Moss, PhD
Over the past year and a half, I have been working as the writer and narrator of an hour-long documentary, Immunotherapy: The Battle Within. Creating this film has been a three-generation affair, with my son, Ben Moss, serving as producer, and my grandson, Jacob Moss, directing, filming, and editing the film. The overall project has been co-sponsored by the Center for Integrative Oncology and Moss Reports.
This film shows how cancer itself often involves an internal fight within the patient between rogue cancer cells and one’s own immune system—a “Battle Within.” But that internal battle also refers to a struggle within science, spanning more than a century, over the fundamental direction of cancer treatment.
There are three basic elements to the film. We certainly acknowledge the importance of modern-day immunotherapy, with excerpts from our interview with James P. Allison, PhD, co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize for his discovery of immune checkpoint inhibitors. But long before its acceptance by mainstream medicine, immunotherapy survived as a popular complementary or alternative approach to cancer.
We remind our viewers of the controversy over the treatment of cancer by Lawrence Burton, PhD, of Freeport, The Bahamas, which I discussed on 60 Minutes in 1980. We then take the viewer on a tour of European cancer clinics that practice innovative forms of immunotherapy. These include clinics in Vienna, Austria, and Duderstadt, Cologne, and Prien, Germany. Each of these practices a unique form of treatment, sometimes including the use of hyperthermia (heat therapy) and immune-stimulating drugs, such as mistletoe and interleukin-2. We then fly back to the United States to tour American cancer clinics that practice non-conventional approaches to immunotherapy.
A continuous presence in the film is the Coley family, the unsung heroes of cancer immunotherapy. This includes William B. Coley, MD (1862-1936) and his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts (1907-2001).
In their remarkable careers, spanning over a century, they showed that the injection of a mixture of two bacterial byproducts (popularly called “Coley’s toxins”) could have a profound effect on the progression of cancer. While Coley’s contribution to immunotherapy is often given lip service today, Mrs. Nauts is almost totally unknown. Yet she systematically tracked down and published the outcome of all known cases of cancer treated with her father’s treatment—more than a thousand individuals! A surprising number of these had long remissions, which were sometimes tantamount to a cure.
In 18 detailed monographs and numerous papers, Mrs. Nauts and her medical co-authors compiled a record of Coley toxin’s successes—as well as its failures—over a period of 110 years from the 1890s to Mrs. Naut’s death in 2001. It would require a book of its own to fully explain the scope of this treatment.
Mrs. Nauts also identified the factors that greatly increased the likelihood of a favorable outcome. This represented a valuable intellectual heritage, a heritage that is now in danger of being totally lost through not-so-benign neglect. One purpose of the timely documentary is to rescue Coley’s toxins from the frequent misrepresentations one finds on the internet and in popular books on cancer.
Immunotherapy: The Battle Within shows the enormous promise of enhancing and mobilizing the immune system in the fight against cancer. It is a battle that has been waged for over a century. But the full story of its development has never been told before in such an exciting and engaging way.
Check out the link below, for links to the countdown, the trailer, and the film itself.
You can watch the film and find out more at https://www.immunotherapyfilm.com.
