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TEN years ago, Randy Russell found out that a small mole on his shin was skin cancer. He got it removed, but then he found another, and more after that. Each time he had the tumour cut out. “After 10 or 11 surgeries, I got aggravated because it was beginning to bankrupt the family and it wasn’t working,” he says.
Ultimately, he was told it was the end of the road. “They said, ‘You’ve got maybe six, seven months to live. Just go home and die.'” Then, as Russell was leaving the hospital to return to his home in Rock Spring, Georgia, one of the doctors shouted down the hall after him: “Try Vanderbilt!”
A few weeks later, Russell was having an experimental drug injected into his tumours at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in nearby Nashville, Tennessee. Each time he went back, the tumours were half the size. “It was just amazing,” he says. “Finally, the doctors said, ‘Look, there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s just gone.'”
That experimental drug, called T-VEC, was actually a live virus that researchers had tinkered with to make sure it was safe for Russell’s healthy cells, but deadly to his cancer. It is the first ever virus to be approved for treating cancers, and many more are now being tested. These anticancer viruses could give us a powerful new way to kill tumours, not only because they target tumour cells directly, but because they spur our immune systems to do so too. That could make them particularly potent when combined with other immune therapies already transforming cancer treatment.
Usually, viruses cause …
