Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer.
A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients.
It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient’s immune system.
Further trials are planned for later in the year.
Cancer cells
Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK.
The herpes virus is genetically modified in such a way that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.
Once there it has a triple effect – it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells.
In the 17 patients injected with the virus, in addition to their standard treatment, 93 percent showed no trace of cancer after their tumour had been surgically removed.
More than two years later, 82 percent of patients had not succumbed to the disease.
According to Clinical Cancer Research only two of 13 patients given the virus treatment at a high dose relapsed.
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