Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer

[Guest guest]

Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer

People have been talking about this for decades...I guess now they are ready to

try it out in humans...

Common cold virus may be new weapon to fight cancer

· Human trials begin this year

· Scientists say move is 'exciting'

British scientists are preparing to launch trials of a radical new way to fight

cancer, which kills tumours by infecting them with viruses like the common cold.

Leonard Seymour, a professor of gene therapy at Oxford University, who has been

working on the virus therapy with colleagues in London and the US, will lead the

trials later this year. One of the country's leading geneticists, Prof Seymour

has been working with

viruses that kill cancer cells directly, while avoiding harm to healthy tissue.

" In principle, you've got something which could be many times more effective

than regular chemotherapy, " he said.

Cancer-killing viruses exploit the fact that cancer cells suppress the body's

local immune system. " If a cancer doesn't do that, the immune system wipes it

out.

If you can get a virus into a tumour, viruses find them a very good

place to be because there's no immune system to stop them replicating. The

therapy would be especially useful for secondary cancers, called metastases,

which sometimes spread around the body after the first tumour appears. " There's

an awful statistic of patients in the west ... with malignant cancers; 75% of

them go on to die from metastases, " said Prof Seymour.

Two viruses are likely to be examined in the first clinical trials:

adenovirus, which normally causes a cold-like illness, and vaccinia, which

causes cowpox and is also used in the vaccine against smallpox. For safety

reasons, both will be disabled to make them less pathogenic in the trial, but

Prof Seymour said he eventually hopes to use natural viruses.

The first trials will use uncoated adenovirus and vaccinia and will be delivered

locally to liver tumours, in order to establish whether the treatment is safe in

humans and what dose of virus will be needed. Several more years of trials will

be needed, eventually also on the polymer-coated viruses, before the therapy can

be considered for use in the NHS. Though the approach will be examined at first

for cancers that do not respond to conventional treatments, Prof Seymour hopes

that one day it might be applied to all cancers.