The Patients' Stories

Successful Case Stories, Published in Scientific Journals

The use of oncolytic viruses for treatment of glioblastoma, an otherwise incurable brain cancer

January 24, 2023
Shimon Slavin

Safe viruses that can cause lethal diseases in chicken, such as Newcastle disease virus (NDV), are sometimes used as oncolytic viruses (cancer killing viruses) to treat cancer safely.
These pictures shown two patients with fully resistant recurrent glioblastoma, an otherwise incurable disease. One of the patients is currently 24 years out and the other one is 23 years out.
The successful treatment was accomplished by prolonged administration of NDV, an oncolytic virus that can infect chickens but is harmless in men. Unfortunately, until recently, the success rate for the use of oncolytic viruses to treat cancer was extremely small. Therefore, this was considered an unreliable treatment.
Ever since, it has been documented that treatment with oncolytic viruses can cure otherwise-incurable types of cancer, such as glioblastoma. Newer oncolytic viruses with a much higher cancer-killing capacity were recently developed in our center. Preliminary clinical experience suggests that our newly-available harmless oncolytic poultry viruses may induce much more consistent anti-cancer effects
Furthermore, using newly-available oncolytic viruses, Slavin decided to amplify the anti-cancer effects induced by these viruses by combining this treatment with anti-cancer immunotherapy. This can generate a stronger immune response against residual cancer cells “decorated” with viral antigens.
Shown below is the first patient with recurrent brain glioma that refused a second surgical removal of recurrent disease. She responded successfully to treatment with oncolytic viruses, combined with anti-cancer immunotherapy. Accordingly, our current strategy is to follow any treatments based on oncolytic viruses with intensive anti-cancer immunotherapy. Based on our successful preliminary experience, we predict that our oncolytic viruses may become one of the most effective future strategies for treating cancer. This can be combined with innovative anti-cancer immunotherapy, even against cancer cells that are fully resistant to all available anti-cancer modalities.

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