A revolutionary method of cancer treatment gains Cancer Research UK backing
By Lucy Quinton
A new method of combating cancer is set to be tested in a bid to have it recognised and used as an official method in the fight against cancer.
Virotherapy, which could revolutionise cancer treatment, would be another option alongside chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, immunotherapy and monoclonal antibody therapy - which are currently the main ways of dealing with the disease.
This could help transform cancer to the status of chronic condition, rather than the critical illness classification it currently holds.
The difficulty with chemotherapy and radiotherapy is that once the disease begins to spread around the body, it becomes increasingly difficult to combat.
Dr Richard Sullivan, Cancer Research UK's director of clinical programmes, said the charity supported such research and that the method had "exciting potential particularly for the treatment of cancer that has spread".
Dr Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine and honorary consultant oncologist at Hammersmith Hospital, said: "It's not really new - people have been trying this approach for over 40 years. The real problem is selectivity in the body. While the results look good in test tubes, once the viruses are put in whole animals, their ability to selectively target cancer cells fails."
He suggested that these approaches, along with most gene therapy strategies, are five to 10 years off being routinely used and could be used in conjunction with existing therapies.
Killing cancer cells by infecting them with viruses, as with the common cold, will revolutionise the way cancer is treated as human bodies are designed to fight infection by staving off viruses. Cancer cells, however, do not have that same capability.
This new method is in the very early stages of experimentation and, in the next few years, the aim is to start clinical trials.
Dr Julie Sharp, senior cancer information officer at Cancer Research UK, erred on the side of caution. She said the only snag was getting a virus to attack a cancer cell before the healthy cells attacked and neutralised the virus.
Oncolytic virotherapy exploiting the natural ability of some viruses to kill cancer cells is a major area of research.
This latest development came in the wake of news issued in August last year from Cancer Research UK saying scientists had "built in safeguards to anti-cancer viruses to ensure that they will only target cancerous cells".
In contrast to the latest study, which focused on the injection of the common cold into cancerous patients, the earlier study focused on scientists' ability to manipulate the measles virus to only become active in the presence of proteins contained in cancerous cells.
