Cancer Research Institute

To appreciate the history of the Institute, however, we should first look back to 1938. While mourning the death of her father Dr. William B. Coley—a prominent surgeon who practiced medicine in New York between 1890 and 1936—Mrs. Nauts began to go through his papers and came to an important realization. Although Dr. Coley had been a noted cancer surgeon, he was also a pioneer in the non-surgical treatment of cancer, an approach that would lead to some of today's most impactful cancer immunotherapy breakthroughs.