gus often produces alkaloids that benefit the
host. Ye t for the pyrophilous fungi examined
in this study, Clay says, “what they offer the
plant is not clear.” Sydney Glassman, a micro-
bial ecologist at the University of California,
Riverside, who was not involved with the
study, notes that in vitro assays using carbon
isotopes could help uncover these trade-offs
by revealing “nutrient transfer between the
plants and the fungus.”
Miller and his team plan to examine the
details of fungus-host interactions by recre-
ating body snatching in the lab and conduct-
ing long-term field studies, he notes. After all,
many forests where pyrophilous fungi live go
for decades without fire, he says. “So how is
that relationship maintained?”
—Annie Greene
Flu Shot
for Tumors
Nearly 5,000 years ago, Egyptian phy-
sician Imhotep observed a grotesque
but revealing detail about tumors: some
grew so large that they burst open—
and eventually disappeared. Seeing this
happen, ancient texts suggest, he devel-
oped a radical cancer treatment: pierce
patients’ tumors and then wait to see
if they got smaller, cancer researcher
Andrew Zloza of Rush University Medi-
cal Center in Chicago tells The Scientist.
Sometimes they did.
With no knowledge of the human
immune system, Imhotep had hit on an
essential connection between tumors and
infections that wouldn’t appear again in
the scientific literature until the turn of the
20th century, when bone surgeon and can-
cer researcher William Coley began inject-
ing live bacteria and later bacterial toxins
into individuals with sarcoma (Proc R Soc
Med, 3(Surg Sect):1–48, 1910). Although
Coley’s technique showed some success
in treating patients’ cancer, it was quickly
abandoned in favor of emerging chemo-
therapy and radiation therapy, Zloza says.
(See “Fighting Cancer with Infection,
1891,” The Scientist, March 2016.)
Now, as immunotherapy captures can-
cer researchers’ attention, Zloza and oth-
ers have begun to recognize that Imhotep
and Coley might have been onto a majorbreakthrough in immunotherapy: they
were using infections to kick-start can-
cer patients’ own immune systems to tar-
get and kill their tumors. Zloza and his
colleagues recently added to the evidence
for this approach with a study of tumor-
bearing mice treated with the seasonal flu
vaccine: injecting the vaccine, which con-
sists of inactivated flu viruses, directly into
mice’s skin tumors dramatically slowed
the growth of tumors and in some cases
reduced their size, the researchers reported
in January in PNAS (117:1119–28, 2020).“Having this fairly bland vaccine have
such a profound effect on tumor immu-
nity is super surprising,” says Thomas
Kupper, a dermatologist who studies
skin tumor treatments at Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute in Boston and was not
involved in the study. If the results holdNOTEBOOK
Imhotep devel oped a radical
cancer treatment: pierce
patients’ tumors and then
wait to see if they got smaller.ANDRZEJ KRAUZE