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The idea that a virus might shrink a tumour is more than a hundred years old; this history explains the early attempts, why they were abandoned, and what changed.
Kelly and Russell trace oncolytic virotherapy from the first recognition of viruses at the turn of the nineteenth century. Early case reports described cancers regressing during naturally acquired virus infections. That prompted clinical trials in which body fluids containing human or animal viruses were used to transmit infections to patients with cancer. Most often the host immune system arrested the virus and the tumour was unaffected; sometimes, in immunosuppressed patients, the infection persisted and the tumour regressed, but the damage to normal tissues was unacceptable.
Through the 1950s and 1960s researchers tried to force the evolution of viruses with greater tumour specificity by serial passage. Success was limited and many left the field. Reverse genetics brought it back, by allowing viruses to be designed rather than selected. The authors note that penetrating host immune defences, the problem that stopped the first era, remains the unsolved one.
The history is the argument against treating any single dramatic case as proof. For a century, striking individual regressions coexisted with a complete failure to build a reliable treatment, because the same immune response that is needed to kill the tumour also clears the virus. That tension has not been resolved; it has only been engineered around.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.
Shares Stephen J. Russell, Oncolytic viruses.