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Subjects Biological therapy Cancer Genetic engineering Virology. Access through your institution. Buy or subscribe. This is a preview of subscription content.
Change institution. Buy article Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube. Authors Jon Evans View author publications. Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article Cite this article Evans, J. Copy to clipboard. Henry Friedman's brain views fashion. Scott Pelley: I wonder of all the trials and all of the theories and all of the treatments that you have hoped for all of these years, how does this stack up?
Henry Friedman: This, to me, is the most promising therapy I've seen in my career, period. Why would he say that during an early clinical trial with barely enough patients to fill an elevator? Because of the decades of work that have led to this moment. The virus is the creation of, the obsession of, Dr.
Matthias Gromeier, a molecular biologist who's been laboring over this therapy 25 years, the last 15 at duke. Scott Pelley: When you went to your colleagues and said, "I've got it. We'll use the polio virus to kill cancer. Matthias Gromeier: Well, I got a range of responses from, from crazy to you're lying, to all kinds of things. Most people just thought it was too dangerous. Henry Friedman: Oh, I thought he was nuts. I mean I really thought he was using a weapon that produces paralysis.
Other researchers are experimenting with cancer treatments using viruses including HIV, small pox and measles. But polio was Dr.
Gromeier's choice because, as luck would have it, it seeks out and attaches to a receptor that is found on the surface of the cells that make up nearly every kind of solid tumor. It's almost as if polio had evolved for the purpose.
Gromeier re-engineered the polio virus by removing a key genetic sequence. The virus can't survive this way so he repaired the damage with a harmless bit of cold virus. This new modified virus can't cause paralysis or death because it can't reproduce in normal cells. But in cancer cells it does and in the process of replicating, it releases toxins that poison the cell. Duke went to the FDA for approval of this new Frankenstein virus.
Henry Friedman: They were afraid we might create something which could infect the general community. I mean, look at me, I'm a scientist. I'm a physician. And I said, "this is nuts. To satisfy the FDA, they did seven years of safety studies. Tests on 39 monkeys proved they didn't get polio. And in , the FDA approved a trial in humans. Someone had to go first. It's a hell of a thing to be told that you have months to live when you're 20 years old. In , Stephanie Lipscomb was a nursing student with headaches.
A doctor came in to say that she had this glioblastoma tumor the size of a tennis ball. Stephanie Lipscomb: I looked at the nurse that was sitting there holding my hand and I said, "I don't understand.
Like, what did he just say? With recurrent glioblastoma, there were no options except the one that had never been tried before. Stephanie Lipscomb: She looked at Dr. Desjardins and she said you want to do what with my daughter? You want to do what? And I'm like, "lets do it, come on, lets go. Stephanie Lipscomb: It did. I knew how scared my family was. And I didn't want it them to see me scared. Henry Friedman: In point of fact, we didn't know what the polio was gonna do.
We thought the polio virus might help her. We had no idea what it would do in the long haul. It was a crap shoot. It's roll the dice and hope that you're gonna get an answer that is coming up sevens and not coming up snake eyes. Annick Desjardins: So we treated her in May. Then in July the tumor looked bigger, looked really inflamed. I got really concerned, got really worried. Desjardins wanted to go back to traditional treatment - maybe another surgery -- but Stephanie decided, against her advice, to wait.
By October, five months after her infusion, an MRI showed that the tumor hadn't been growing at all. It turned out it only looked worse because it was inflamed. Stephanie's immune system had awakened to the cancer and gone to war. Matthias Gromeier: So cancers, all human cancers, they develop a shield or shroud of protective measures that make them invisible to the immune system.
And this is precisely what we try to reverse with our virus. So by infecting the tumor, we are actually removing this protective shield. And telling the-- enabling the immune system to come in and attack.
Scott Pelley: So essentially what's happening here inside the tumor is you have a polio infection. It appears the polio starts the killing but it's the immune system that does most of the damage. Stephanie's tumor shrank for 21 months until it was gone.
This is an MRI from this past August. Three years after the infusion, something unimaginable has happened for a patient with recurrent glioblastoma. Annick Desjardins: And we don't see any cancer, active cancer cells in this tumor at all. She is cancer free. The only thing that remains is this hole, which is an artifact of an early surgery. Scott Pelley: Under traditional standard-of-care treatment Stephanie should not be standing here next to us today? Henry Friedman: I'm surprised because you never expect on a Phase 1 study in particular, which is what she is on, to have these kinds of results.
Henry Friedman: You're not even necessarily expecting to help them. You hope so. But that's not the design of a Phase 1 study. It's designed to get the right dose. When you get anything on top of that its cake. Henry Friedman: Quite a cake. Quite a cake. Biggest cake we've seen in a long, long time. Fritz Andersen showed us the results in another patient -- himself.
He's a retired cardiologist and at age 70, he became the second person in the polio trial. On the left is his tumor before treatment, on the right a hairline scar where it used to be. Like Stephanie, that was nearly three years ago. Fritz Andersen: So when they said that this thing is just a small scar, and we think it's possibly cured. I nearly fell off my chair.
I said, "that's, that's, that's impossible. Fritz and Stephanie met for the first time here at 60 Minutes when we interviewed them last fall. With the early success the team raised the dose in the next few patients in hope of an even better result.
But that's when the polio trial encountered its first tragedies. When we come back we'll look at how the virus is working in Nancy Justice, who we met in the beginning, and at what they've discovered after trying polio against lung cancer, breast cancer and many others. For nearly a year we've been following the clinical trial at Duke University where the polio virus is being used to kill a vicious brain cancer called glioblastoma. The goal of the experiment was to discover the right dose of the virus.
The first two patients saw their tumors melt away. So, with that remarkable result at small doses, the researchers increased the potency of the virus in the next patients.
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