Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City believe a virus in the smallpox family could treat a deadly kind of breast cancer.
New research shows the small pox virus attacks and kills breast cancer cells in triple-negative breast cancer, which researchers believe is encouraging news.
“One of the reasons I wanted to focus on triple-negative breast cancer is that there aren’t many long-term treatment options for these patients,” lead author Dr. Sepideh Gholami explained in an American College of Surgeons news release. “Right now the only options are surgery and chemotherapy, but these cancers metastasize early on and are really aggressive. Resistance develops fast to multiple agents of chemotherapy so patients run out of options easily.”
Virus destroys cancer cells
Lab tests show 90 percent of TNBC cells treated with the small pox virus were killed within four days.
“Based upon pathology, we could see that at least 60 percent of the tumors were completely regressed and the other 40 percent had very little areas of tumor cells present with a lot of necrosis (die off), which is a sign that the tumor was responding to therapy,” said Gholami.
While the results are encouraging, it was not effective in all cases. Still, Dr. Laura Kruper, director of the Cooper Finkel Women’s Health Center believes the development could be significant down the road.
“If the results of this study can be translated into a form which can be given to women with triple-negative breast cancer, this would be a huge advance in breast cancer therapies,” Kruper told ABC News.
Clinical trials will be conducted before the virus is tested on women.
Your feedback
What do you think about this research? Is it promising or disturbing considering it uses a version of the small pox virus?
