The Unconventional Ally

Image Credit - skeeze from Pixabay (Originally blue, converted to pink)

Every single day, a quiet war is fought in laboratories and hospitals around the globe to find a cure… a cure for cancer. But with what guts do we tell patients, fighting for just one more tomorrow, that their cure belongs in a future they may never live to see?

A Different Approach

There are plausible treatment options, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy. However, in the process of removing cancerous cells, current treatments also destroy healthy cells needed to fight cancer. 

To solve this problem, scientists developed oncolytic virotherapy. It is a treatment plan where a human virus is altered in a lab and then injected into a person with cancer. After entering the body, the virus multiplies inside a cancer cell until the cell bursts open and dies. This destruction releases the virus to hunt down and destroy nearby cancerous cells one by one.

Crucially, the cell’s bursting does more than just release the virus; it also spills out cellular proteins that act as an alarm system. Because the virus is built to instigate a defense response, this sudden release alerts and activates the body's immune cells. Essentially, the therapy re-energizes the body’s natural defenses, turning its own immune system into a powerful weapon to hunt down and attack the remaining cancer.

T-VEC, a virotherapy, was approved for melanoma in the U.S. in 2015, where it was able to reduce the risk of death by 21%. The treatments for nonmelanoma skin cancer and Merkel cell carcinoma are still under work, and it would take some time before a way to treat these are approved as well. 

Doubling the Odds of Survival

The final tests that led to T-VEC approval for skin cancer showed that it helped 19% of patients achieve a durable response. This means their tumors shrank and stayed smaller for at least six months. For patients who received a standard dummy treatment instead, that success rate was only about 1%.

The results were even more impressive in a European study that looked at patients with advanced skin cancer that had already spread to distant skin, muscles, or lymph nodes. In that study, patients who were treated with T-VEC lived an average of nearly 47 months. On the other hand, the patients who did not receive T-VEC lived for an average of only 21.5 months. This shows that the treatment more than doubled the survival time for people with advanced cancer.

Conclusion

To put it plainly, there is no cure for cancer (yet). However, scientists and doctors are exploring new ways to fight, and looking back, it’s amazing to see how much humanity has accomplished. Even though a universal cure may take time, today’s advancements have rewritten the stories of millions, giving them the most precious gift of all: time.

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