An Exciting New Cancer Treatment You Probably Didn’t Know

This treatment is by no means a sure cure, but researchers are happy with the results they have been seeing in treating glioblastoma. They plan to extend future trials to include other types of cancer including breast cancer, which is susceptible to this new form of treatment as well. Here, Dr. Henry Friedman (the Deputy Director of the Adult and Pediatric Neuro-oncology program at Duke) discusses his excitement towards these experimental trials!

How does it work? Instead of infecting the patients with polio, the treatment they’ve been developing over the past decade works by targeting only cancer cells and infecting them with polio. The study published from Duke’s Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center says, “[the genetically modified polio] kills cancer cells, but not normal cells, because its ability to grow (and kill) depends on biochemical abnormalities only present in cancer cells.” The hope is that once the injected tumors are gone, the body’s immune system will continue to fight off new cancer cells and halt the disease in its tracks. The trials are still ongoing but this is nonetheless an exciting development in the field of cancer research!

What does this mean for the future? That it is full of hope. With exciting breakthroughs like this, we need to support those conducting cancer research now more than ever. There is research being done at the University Of Michigan that uses the human genome to target better treatments for specific patients. Your donation will help research take another giant leap towards a cure!

Genetic changes that drive tumors are highly variable, and a one-size-fits-all approach is clearly not effective. Instead of broad-brush therapies that destroy both cancerous and healthy cells, research is now focused on the unique and complex nature of each individual cancer.

Kevin Harrington, Professor of Biological Cancer Therapies at The Institute of Cancer Research and head of the trial, has been working on this particular virus for about a decade. Before he signed onto the project, it was primarily being investigated as a breast cancer treatment. But Harrington brought head, neck, and skin cancer patients into the mix, and melanoma seemed to have the best responses of all.

Here’s how T-VEC works: It starts with the herpes virus, which is magnificent at proliferating itself within cells and then causing them to burst (that’s where the cold sores come from). But T-VEC has had two key genes removed. These keep it from replicating within healthy cells, which can quickly spot it because of the missing genes.

But cancer cells aren’t as savvy, and T-VEC has its run of them. Meanwhile, T-VEC has also been modified to produce a molecule called GM-CSF, which serves as a red flag waved at the immune system.

So in addition to the destructive power of the T-VEC cells themselves, the therapy summons the immune system right to where it’s needed — the tumor.

Change the way we fight cancer!

Your donation will go to the innovative research being done by Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan’s team at the University of Michigan in the battle against cancer.

WILL STEFANSKI

blog.thebreastcancersite.com