On August 24 this year, a publication appeared in the journal Vaccines, under a special issue titled ‘Advances in Cancer Vaccines as Promising Immuno-Therapeutics’. The article detailed the use of two viruses – measles and vesicular stomatitis, to treat a patient who had recurring breast cancer. The technique involved the injection of the viruses directly into the tumour, which lead to a stop in its growth, a reduction in its size, and allowed surgeons to excise it.
Despite the success of the procedure, no journal was prepared to publish the results before Vaccines finally accepted the paper. This was because, the team did not have the approval of an ethics committee – a primary requirement for any study involving human or animal subjects. The team argued that they didn’t need an ethics committee approval because Dr.
Beata Halassy, the lead scientist on the research, had performed the experiment on herself. The idea to use specific viruses to target cancer cells is not new. Scientists have known for over 100 years that certain viral infections cause tumours to shrink.
Experimental evidence is available since 1951 , when it was shown that that certain strains of tickborne encephalitis viruses cause an inhibition of the growth of tumours in mice. However, the first large-scale clinical trial with this idea did not happen until 2004, when a modified adenovirus named H101 was used in combination with chemotherapy to treat patients with advanced cancers in China. The fir.
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