Polio Virus Could Help Treat Brain Cancer. Here ’s How

The idea that viruses may be co-opted to do good rather than harm isn’t entirely new; researchers have been attempting to harness the power of viruses and bacteria for more than a century. Vaccines are the shining example of using bad bugs to do good in priming the immune system to fight disease. But disease-causing viruses aren’t always easy to corral, and attempts to use them to activate the immune system against things other than fellow bacteria and viruses — including cancer, for example — have not been so successful. There is only one approved virus-based treatment for cancer, which uses herpes virus against melanoma. In a new report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, scientists led by a team at Duke University report they may have trained another virus to target cancer, by using poliovirus to target brain tumors. Dr. Darell Bigner, emeritus director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Cancer Center, and his team engineered a poliovirus that was designed to target a difficult-to-treat brain cancer known as glioblastoma. Among a group of 61 people who had failed to respond to current therapies, which include radiation and chemotherapy, 21% who received the poliovirus treatment were alive after three years, compared to 4% who generally survive that long following standard therapy. The virus-based therapy is the culmination of 20 years of work by Bigner’s colleague Dr. Matthias Gromeier, p...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Cancer healthytime Source Type: news