Two medical pioneers aim to trial a cancer-killing virus. I aim to help out

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/2013-new-approach-fighting-cancer


A cancer of cancer? … Professor Magnus Essand and Dr Justyna Leja at the University of Uppsala have engineered a virus that will attack tumours

Just north of Stockholm, among the creaking Swedish ice-forests, three revolutions for 2013 are taking place.

Revolution One: Two researchers at the University of Uppsala have engineered a virus that will attack cancer. Cheap, precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects, this plucky little microbe sounds too good to be true. Yet in peer-reviewed articles in top journals, Professor Magnus Essand and Dr Justyna Leja have repeatedly showed that Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD views healthy tissue with disdain; it eats only tumours. It is, in effect, a cancer of cancer.

That viral infections can eliminate cancer cells has long been known. In 1896, a German woman with leukemia went into remission after catching flu. Her bloated liver and spleen shrank to almost normal size; her explosive white blood cell count dropped 70-fold. Some cancer patients who caught measles, hepatitis or glandular fever experienced temporary recovery. In 1949, in a rather wild set of experiments, patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma were injected with viral hepatitis: one died, 13 contracted hepatitis, but seven experienced temporary improvement. It wasn't until the swell in understanding of genetics in the 1990s that scientists learned how to manufacture and control the anti-tumour effect of these anti-cancer bugs.

What makes Essand and Leja's work revolutionary is that it involves a safe virus genetically engineered to attack a type of tumour known as neuroendocrine cancer (also called carcinoids or NETs). NETs can occur almost anywhere in the body, and will often tip-toe up and down the colon, around the liver and into the lung before your GP spots something wrong. Many other cancers, once they begin to spread, acquire features of NETs. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic NETs. A few years ago, scientists looked at intestines in more than 30,000 dead bodies and discovered that about one in 100 people have NETs. Many are benign, but some, for reasons unknown, explode into malignancy. More people have NETs than pancreatic and stomach cancer combined