Engineering Opportunities in Cancer Immunotherapy: After Decades of Missteps and Delays, a Growing Immune-Oncology Market and Improved Cancer Treatment Outcomes Open New Prospects for Biomedical Engineers and Data Scientists

More than a century ago, the American surgeon William Coley noticed a correlation between cancer remissions and postoperative infections: some patients who had battled an infection also experienced a regression of their cancer. Because of these observations, Coley hypothesized that a patient's immune response to a bacterial infection could be leveraged to treat cancer. To test his hypothesis, Coley injected live bacteria into an inoperable tumor of one of his patients. The patient's tumor regressed, and Coley went on to experiment with direct injections of live, and later heat-killed, bacteria into more than a thousand patients over the next 40-plus years. Coley's toxins never achieved widespread clinical success due to concerns over reproducibility, although a strain of mycobacterium, bacillus Calmette-Guerin, is still routinely administered to treat early-stage bladder cancers.