Heal by Arlene Weintraub

Author:Arlene Weintraub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HEA039030
ISBN: 9781770908000
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

From iPods to Cowpox:

Offbeat Attacks against Solid Tumors

A physician in Ann Arbor, Michigan, named George Dock was treating a forty-two-year-old woman for leukemia when she came down with a bad case of the flu. Much to Dock’s surprise, the patient’s cancerous liver and spleen, which had been greatly enlarged by the disease, returned to their normal sizes. Her white blood cells — the immune cells that grow out of control in patients with leukemia and other blood-born cancers — began to vanish, dropping sevenfold in the days following her bout with the virus. She enjoyed a short remission from her cancer.

Dock later wrote a paper about the case, strongly urging the medical community to examine whether the answer to treating cancer lies in other diseases.[ 1 ]

That was in 1896 — a full thirty-seven years before scientists were even able to classify influenza as a virus. And the medical journals continued to publish report after report of cancer patients whose disease disappeared after they were struck by another illness, usually the flu or the measles or something else that would later prove to be a virus.

By the 1950s, the scientific community fully understood many of the characteristics that made viruses different from other microbes, most notably their ability to invade just about any cell in the body and replicate inside of it, causing everything from mild illnesses like the common cold to crippling and sometimes deadly plagues, such as polio and smallpox. This discovery had oncology researchers all over the world harkening back to Dock’s leukemia patient and the other virus-stricken cancer patients whose remarkable — albeit brief — remissions were still being reported in medical journals. They began trying to turn viruses into cancer drugs and tested them on patients.

Nothing worked. The viruses were either too weak to wage an effective attack against tumors or they were so strong they put patients at risk of dying from a lethal immune response, not to the cancer but to the viruses ­themselves. By the end of the 1970s, the search for cancer-­killing viruses was all but abandoned.[ 2 ]

Two decades later, Aladár Szalay, a Hungarian-born molecular geneticist, started a biotech company in San Diego with the intention of developing virus-based drugs to treat a range of solid tumors. From day one, Szalay believed pet dogs with cancer would help him resurrect the field of virotherapy.

By this time, genetic engineering had evolved to the point where scientists could tweak the viruses — removing links from their DNA chains, or adding links to them. Such genetic changes improved the ability of the viruses to find and kill cancer cells, while at the same time ensuring healthy cells would be spared. Szalay and others working in the field believed these advances would prevent the dangerous immune storms that had foiled so many past virotherapies.

Genelux’s lead drug was a genetically modified form of vaccinia, more commonly known as cowpox. This is the same virus that is the basis of the smallpox vaccine, which was

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