British prostate cancer patients are to receive a revolutionary ‘seek and destroy’ treatment that promises to obliterate tumours.
The so-called Trojan-horse therapy hides cancer-killing viruses in the immune system, enabling them to sneak into cancerous growths.
Experts were stunned after testing it on mice. All tumours were destroyed and the rodents were cured.
Now 15 men in Sheffield are to start a £1million clinical trial using the technique – the first time it has been tested in humans. The use of viruses to combat cancer is a rapidly growing field of medical research.
But it has been hindered by the need to get the virus deep into the tumour so it can do the most damage.
The Sheffield University team has overcome this hurdle by ‘surfing’ on the body’s immune response.
They developed a treatment that seeks out traces of the cancer anywhere in the body – including secondary tumours that doctors have not even spotted.
Immune cells burrow deep into each tumour and burst, releasing the virus which then rapidly multiplies, destroying the tumour from the inside out.
Professor Claire Lewis, whose team developed the treatment, said: ‘The virus replicates – it creates about 10,000 copies a day.
‘There is no reason it shouldn’t work for all cancer types.
‘We are testing it in mice for breast cancer, lung cancer and brain cancer.’
She said there should be no side-effects because of how the therapy uses the body’s immune system.
It works by using white blood cells called macrophages – derived from the Greek for ‘big eaters’.
These healing cells seek out areas of injury or infection and destroy cellular debris, clearing the way for tissue damage to be repaired and new blood vessels to be built.
The Sheffield team discovered that when a patient is given chemotherapy, macrophages go into overdrive, swarming to the tumour site to heal damage done by the treatment.
Usually, this is a major setback, undoing the good work done by the chemotherapy.
However, the scientists realised they could harness this natural response to seek out any tumours.
They established a technique in which they take blood samples and extract the macrophages.
A tumour-killing virus is put into them before they are injected back into the blood.
In experiments, the results of which were published in the journal Cancer Research, mice were injected with the white blood cells two days after a course of chemotherapy ended.
After 12 hours the cells burst and released the viruses.
The team found that the mice given the treatment were still alive at the end of the 40-day study and had no sign of tumours.
Mice on other treatments, by comparison, died after the cancer spread. – Daily Mail