60 Minutes aired a double-episode tonight on what appears to be a breakthrough in cancer treatment that involves using the polio virus to trigger the body's natural immune response into attacking cancer. The results of the Phase I trial have been stunning.
The episode was full of caveats, but it is hard to watch this without thinking that a corner has been turned in the fight against cancer. For me, the most exciting part of the therapy is that it appears to be indiscriminate in the the type of cancer it attacks. We have often been told that cancer is not one disease, but a range of different diseases. This makes developing effective therapies extremely difficult. However, ALL cancers apparently have at least one characteristic in common: they all have the ability to trick the immune system into reacting to the tumor as though it were normal tissue. The polio therapy removes that protective sheath and exposes the cancer to the relentless attacks by the body's own immune system. In fact, the only major problem researchers have thus far run into is that, while attempting to determine the proper dose, they discovered that doses too large resulted in an immune response so powerful that it did more harm than good.
I wonder if 60 Minutes is aware of the response this report is likely to stimulate. My guess is that CBS News and Duke University (who is running the study) are going to deluged with requests from desperate patients demanding this new therapy.
