Hope for skin cancer patients—but don't forget to take precautions in the sun
Doctors and researchers are saying "virotherapy" shows
enormous promise:
Patients with aggressive skin cancer have been treated successfully using a drug based on the herpes virus, in a trial that could pave the way for a new generation of cancer treatments.
The findings mark the first positive phase 3 trial results for cancer “virotherapy”, where one disease is harnessed and used to attack another. If approved, the drug, called T-VEC, could be more widely available for cancer patients by next year, scientists predicted.
Crucially, the therapy has the potential to overcome cancer even when the disease has spread to organs throughout the body, offering hope in future to patients who have been faced with the bleakest prognosis.
More on
how it works:
T‑vec (Talimogene laherparepvec—a modified form of virus) has had two non-essential viral genes removed, to suppress the ability to cause disease and to evade detection by the host’s immune system. Normal cells are therefore easily able to detect and destroy the viral agent, but genetic mutations in the melanoma cells prevent this. The virus therefore replicates preferentially in only the cancer cells.
On top of this cancer-cell specificity, T‑vec includes another modification, insertion of the gene for human granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), expression of which enhances active immune responses against infected host cells.
This new form of ‘virotherapy’ for cancer therefore cleverly combines two distinct approaches, to both selectively replicate inside tumour cells and induce the host immune system to target and destroy these cells.
This might provide hope for the roughly
5 million people in the United States treated for skin cancer EACH year. Here are a few more stunning facts on skin cancer and a reminder that we all need to take more precautions to prevent it:
Each year in the US, nearly 5 million people are treated for skin cancer.61 In 2006, in the most recent study available, 3.5 million cases were diagnosed in 2.2 million people.2
Each year there are more new cases of skin cancer than the combined incidence of cancers of the breast, prostate, lung and colon.
Treatment of nonmelanoma skin cancers increased by nearly 77 percent between 1992 and 2006.
Over the past three decades, more people have had skin cancer than all other cancers combined.
One in five Americans will develop skin cancer in the course of a lifetime.
13 million white non-Hispanics living in the US at the beginning of 2007 had at least one nonmelanoma skin cancer, typically diagnosed as basal cell carcinoma (BCC) or squamous cell carcinoma (SCC).
Between 40 and 50 percent of Americans who live to age 65 will have either BCC or SCC at least once.