Cancer-Fighting Virus

A small patient trial offers hope that cancer-killing viruses might be a viable therapy after all.

Written byRuth Williams

| 3 min read

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A common virus given to patients intravenously can avoid immune detection, hitching a ride on immune cells in the blood, and find its way to tumor targets, where it replicates and destroys the cancerous cells, according to a report out today (June 13) in Science Translational Medicine.

“A lot of people in the field … had suggested that giving the virus into the blood couldn’t work because the antibodies would neutralize it straight away,” explained Alan Melcher, a clinical oncologist at the University of Leeds in the UK, who led the study. His team’s work now shows it is in fact an efficient way to target a tumor.

A laboratory-grown virus that can infect humans and evade the immune system might sound like it belongs ...

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Meet the Author

Ruth Williams
Ruth is a freelance journalist. Before freelancing, Ruth was a news editor for the Journal of Cell Biology in New York and an assistant editor for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in London. Prior to that, she was a bona fide pipette-wielding, test tube–shaking, lab coat–shirking research scientist. She has a PhD in genetics from King’s College London, and was a postdoc in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Today she lives and writes in Connecticut.
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