Russell said he had engineered the virus to make it more suitable for cancer therapy. After just one dose, the cancer went into remission. She has been completely cleared of the disease, Russell wrote in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Though, in this trial, the treatments were successful on only one of two patients.
And Tanios Bekaii-Saab, a researcher at James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute in Ohio, said the study must be confirmed in large randomized clinical trials, where many hopes get dashed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
“Unless we get to the third stage of development, we are cautiously optimistic,” he said. In a proof of principle clinical trial, Mayo Clinic researchers have demonstrated that virotherapy, destroying cancer with a virus that infects and kills cancer cells but spares normal tissues, can be effective against the deadly cancer multiple myeloma.
Oncolytic virotherapy, using re-engineered viruses to fight cancer, has a history dating back to the 1950s. Thousands of cancer patients have been treated with oncolytic viruses from many different virus families (herpes viruses, pox viruses, common cold viruses, etc.). However, this study provides the first well-documented case of a patient with disseminated cancer having a complete remission at all disease sites after virus administration.