In Canada, OC Gruner (1935) was also studying pleomorphic organisms and cancer. He isolated such an organism, which he named Cryptomyces pleomorpha, from a breast tumour. He found that:
1941: Pleomorphic forms from Hodgkin’s lymphoma
Dr Mazet, a French physician, in Extrait de Montpellier Medicalle (1941), wrote of finding a bacteria in a patient with Hodgkin’s disease. He then cultured an acid fast organism from 12 Hodgkin’s patients. He regarded the organism as highly pleomorphic with phases varying from small granules to fungal type elements, including coccoid forms, mycelia and rod forms. He inoculated blood from a Hodgkin’s patient into a mouse that, when sacrificed 15 days later, yielded the same organism from its brain tissue.
1948: Siphonospora from cancer tissue
In Germany in 1948 Von Brehmer published his work on an organism which he named Siphonospora polymorphs that he claimed caused cancer. He had published earlier (1934) on this organism, which he had cultured from human blood. He found that this organism parasitised epithelial cells as well as erythrocytes and leucocytes. Von Brehmer developed a therapy that involved the use of pooled cultures of Siphonospora isolated from several different types of neoplasm.
1952: Pleomorphic studies of micromyces
From more than 1000 samples of tumour tissue, blood and ascites fluids of cancerous patients, Franz Gerlach (1952) isolated a pleomorphic, filter passing organism that he called Micromyces blastogenes. He later renamed this organism Micromyces universalis innatus and regarded it as a micro fungus. Again this organism was filterable (able to pass through a fine filter). One of the stages in its life cycle resembled a Mycoplasma like organism.
Gerlach produced a ‘polyvalent’ vaccine by passing the organism through numerous passages of culture media. He claimed his vaccine stopped the growth of cancers enabling many patients to go into remission, without side effects (Gerlach 1961).
1955: Cancer ‘virus’ extracted from 1000 cancers
Dr John E Gregory published the last edition of his book Pathogenesis of Cancer in 1955. In it he described finding cell wall deficient forms which he referred to as a cancer virus, extracted from tissue samples of 1000 human cancers.
In total he examined 31 types of cancers and found the virus to be present in all but eight of the 1000 samples. The negative results were found in five Hodgkin’s blood cultures, although he obtained positive cultures from 10 lymph nodes of Hodgkin’s patients. He could not culture the virus from two lymphosarcoma patients’ blood cultures, but had positive results from five other patients with the same disease.
Gregory produced a culture from malignant melanoma which he injected into mice and baby chickens: 25% of the injected animals developed cancers. These included cancers of the ovary, adrenal gland, breast and stomach, spindle cell sarcoma, myosarcoma and leukaemia. His control group, which was larger than the research group by a factor of ten, developed no malignancies. Gregory found that the virus isolated from the induced cancers was the same as the injectable form and could be re-cultured to again produce the same cancer. Because the types of cancer varied from the original melanoma, he concluded that the inoculations were not cancer cells from the host, but viral forms that induced a cancer.