New therapy uses virus to treat deadly blood cancers

CALGARY- Anne Cameron is preparing herself for a painful anniversary. It’s been almost a year since she lost her son, Ty  to an aggressive form of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia.

“September 10^th, he went to heaven,” Cameron says. “He actually didn’t have cancer when he went to heaven, his organs started failing and that was due to the harshness of the medications.”

Blood cancers are very difficult to treat, requiring harsh medications or bone marrow transplants. The therapies bring patients to the brink of death and too often, even that is not enough.

“The survival rates are not good because we can initially treat the tumour burden but eventually the cancer returns,” explains Dr. David Conrad, a researcher with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

Conrad’s team has been trying to find alternative, less toxic ways to treat leukemia and other blood cancers– and they appear to be on to something.  They’ve developed unique virus-derived particles that can kill human blood cancer cells in the lab and have eradicated the disease in mice with very few side effects.

“60 per cent (of the mice) lived to the end of the experiment which was hundreds of days but 80 per cent had markedly prolonged survival compared to those that weren’t treated,”  Dr. Conrad says.

Not only do the particles kill the cancer, they also trigger an immune response allowing the body to remember and attack the cancer if it ever returns.

Results have been so promising, researchers hope to move forward with human clinical trials within two years.

Cameron calls the breakthrough amazing.

“It’s an answer to prayer, and it gives so many families so much hope.”

Dr. David Conrad’s research was co-authored by Dr. John Bell.  It has been published in Blood Cancer Journal.

Extended: Dr. David Conrad