Can Viruses Treat Cancer?

VIDEO: Watch video of Dr. Jim Olson- How Nature and a 9-Year Old Are Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment.

The woman lived cancer-free until 1912. Soon thereafter several other Italian patients with cervical cancer also received the vaccine—a live rabies virus that had been weakened. As reported by Nicola De Pace in 1910, tumors in some patients shrank, presumably because the virus somehow killed the cancer. All eventually relapsed and died, however.

Even though the patients perished, the notion of treating cancer with viruses able to kill malignant cells—now termed oncolytic virotherapy—was born. And investigators had some success in laboratory animals. Yet for a long time only partial responses and rare cures in human trials ensured that the field stayed at the fringes of cancer research. Viral therapy for cancer faced several additional hurdles: uncertainty about its mechanisms and how to use viruses to achieve cures, a dearth of tools with which to engineer more effective viral strains and the habitual reluctance of physicians to infect patients with pathogens. Doctors elected to use poisons (chemotherapy) instead of microbes—mostly because they were more comfortable with those drugs and understood them better.

Stem Cells: The Real Culprits in Cancer?
A dark side of stem cells–their potential to turn malignant–is at the root of a handful of cancers and may be the cause of many more. Eliminating the disease could depend on tracking down and destroying these elusive killer cells.
After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence.

In other malignancies, new drugs are able to at least hold the disease at bay, making it a condition with which a patient can live. In 2001, for example, Gleevec was approved for the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). The drug has been a huge clinical success, and many patients are now in remission following treatment with Gleevec. But evidence strongly suggests that these patients are not truly cured, because a reservoir of malignant cells responsible for maintaining the disease has not been eradicated.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-viruses-treat-cancer/