On March 29, 2015, the 60 Minutes program on CBS aired an episode entitled Killing Cancer. The episode follows the experimental cancer immunotherapy treatments for four patients, all with cancerous Glioblastoma brain tumors, participating in a Phase 1 clinical trial (approved by the FDA in 2011) at Duke University in North Carolina.
The treatment involves infusing the tumors with a single dose of genetically-modified polio virus. The idea behind the treatment is that the virus, which cannot reproduce in normal cells, reproduces in cancer cells and releases a toxin which kills the cancer cells. This makes the tumor "visible" to the patient's immune system, starting a process where the immune system itself attacks the tumor. So, the virus gets the process started, but it's the immune system that takes over and does most of the work killing the cancer.
One goal of the Phase 1 clinical trial is to determine the optimum dosage (amount) of polio virus to administer.
In the episode, three patients with lower doses of the virus have very positive results, and one patient given a higher dose has negative results, drops out of the trial, and eventually dies.
The discovery and development of this specific treatment is attributed to Dr. Mathias Gromeier, a molecular biologist at Duke who has been developing this therapy for 25 years. He has been able to use the same virus to kill many other different kinds of cancers in the laboratory including lung, breast, colorectal, prostate, pancreatic, liver, and renal cancer.
Regarding this experimental treatment, Dr. Henry S. Friedman, a neuro-oncologist and Deputy Director at The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University said:
This, to me, is the most-promising therapy I’ve seen in my career, period.
Watch Killing Cancer on the CBS News website and/or read a transcript here.
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