THE BREAKTHROUGH

Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer

By Charles Graeber

Illustrated. 302 pp. Twelve. $28.

If someone were to give cancer a human face, it would probably be that of an archvillain in a comic book series — a master of evil who can adapt at will to any attack, lurking lethally in the shadows, shifting its shape and location, resistant to almost any weaponry humans devise. At least, that has been the story until very recently; the new book by Charles Graeber, “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer,” artfully traces the history of old and new developments that may have — finally — resulted in an actual cure for the most dreaded of all diseases. If you or a loved one has recently received a cancer diagnosis, or has been living with it as a chronic, if terrifying, condition, this book and the advances it describes offer far more than the usual glimmer of hope.

Immunotherapy essentially involves training the body’s own immune system to fight the disease. It’s an idea that scientists have been exploring since the end of the 19th century, when a Harvard-trained surgeon named William Coley met a vivacious young woman with a painful lump on her hand, swollen to half the size of an olive. Coley found and cut out a mass, but it grew back. Eventually it was found to be a sarcoma, a form of cancer that was already racing through his young patient’s body. She died at 17.

Disturbed by her death and determined to find another way to treat cancer, Coley began searching through his hospital’s medical records. He soon came upon the case of a sad sack German immigrant named Fred Stein. Stein had been hospitalized in 1885 with an egg-size mass bulging from his left cheek; every time he was operated on — five times in the next three years — it came back stronger until it was, in Graeber’s words, “as big as a man’s fist.” Like many patients who endured frequent hospitalizations, Stein also contracted streptococcus pyogenes, which caused high fever, chills, inflammation and, far too often, death. (Its old name, dating back to the Middle Ages, was St. Anthony’s Fire.)