Cold virus ‘could be used to kill cancer cells’

PLANS are underway for trials of a radical way of fighting cancer, killing tumours by infecting them with viruses like the common cold.

If successful, the virus therapy could become a third pillar, alongside radiotherapy and chemotherapy, in the standard battle against cancer, it was reported.

Professor of gene therapy at Oxford University Leonard Seymour will lead the trials later this year. He has been working with viruses that kill cancer cells while avoiding harming healthy tissue.

Prof Seymour told The Guardian newspaper that in principle the treatment could be “many times more effective than regular chemotherapy”.

“If you can get a virus into a tumour, viruses find them a very good place to be because there’s no immune system to stop them replicating. You can regard it as the cancer’s Achilles’ heel,” he said.

He said that only a small amount of the virus needed to get to the cancer as “they replicate, you get a million copies in each cell and the cell bursts and they infect the tumour cells adjacent and repeat the process”.

Preliminary research on mice has shown that the viruses work well on tumours that resist standard cancer drugs, the newspaper said.

Several more years of trials will be needed before the therapy can be considered for use on the NHS, but it is hoped that they can eventually be used on all cancers.