Keep the faith . . . . another breakthrough is upon us!

Hello fellow fighters!

I have copied and pasted an article from an Ottawa paper. This looks like an exciting breakthrough and I will be talking to my oncologist about it at my next appointment - unfortunately, not for another month.

yoga jo
who is smiling at this moment

Ottawa researchers make advances in fight against cancer
By Scott Taylor ,Ottawa Sun
First posted: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 05:10 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 05:13 PM EDT

OTTAWA – Other than an outright cure, the Holy Grail in the fight against cancer is finding a way to stop tumours from growing and spreading. Thanks to a scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and his home-grown virus, that goal is closer than ever.

Dr. John Bell said the genetically engineered virus JX594, which is related to the virus used to vaccinate against smallpox, attacks and kills cancer cells while leaving surrounding healthy tissue intact.

"When people get chemotherapy, they really get devastated by the treatment because the chemotherapy attacks not only the cancer, but their normal tissues," Bell said.

"What we've done is build viruses that are basically parasites of the tumour that directly infect it and kill it without affecting the normal tissue.

“So the new wrinkle to this is that we've shown we can keep the virus in the bloodstream of patients. It can swim around their body and look everywhere for where cancer may be hiding and attack it."

The minor side effects include flu-like symptoms that last usually for less than 24 hours and can be treated with over-the-counter remedies.

Bell and his team gave a single injection of the virus to 23 terminally ill cancer patients.

Ten days later, seven of the eight that were given a higher dose had evidence that the virus replicated in their tumour, but did not affect normal tissue. Six of those patients saw their tumours shrink or at least stop growing.

The trial results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Bell, who co-authored the article and is a professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, said he and a team of scientists in Ottawa and around the world have been studying this concept for more than a decade.

He estimates that the treatment is only 24 to 36 months away from receiving FDA approval.

"We're sort of in the home stretch now," he said. "We still have to do larger studies to prove that this is holding up, but in animal models it looks very, very good and now the results from the latest trial are very optimistic.”

The next step will involve a trial of 120 patients with liver cancer.

"In this trial, we'll compare our virus to the best therapy currently available for liver cancer and we're hoping to show that our virus is better."

The virus has not yet shown the same level of success on leukemia and lymphoma.