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American Morning

Researchers Use Cold Virus to Fight Cancer

Aired April 08, 2002 - 08:41   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Some important health news to share with you this morning. A medical breakthrough: a genetically engineered cold virus may kill colon and gastrointestinal cancers. But unlike chemotherapy, the virus targets tumors, but does not kill healthy cells. And CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins us with more on that. Good morning.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

ZAHN: This is big news.

COHEN: It's big news, and it's so interesting, Paula, because it's a completely different way of thinking about treating cancer. We usually think of treating cancer with chemotherapy or radiation, but this is a totally different way of looking at it. So let's talk a little bit about what the doctors did. The doctors took 28 people who had had cancer in their colon, that it spread to the liver, and these were very, very sick people. It was end-stage cancer, they had six months to live, and with this treatment, they actually lived for a year, and the tumors that they had seemed to shrink and sort of melt away.

Let's take a look at some pictures that explain exactly what this virus did. They took people who had cancer, and you can see those cancer cells on the left, and then you see healthy cells on the right, and they gave them a cold virus. They inject it into their arteries, a cold virus. They made them ill, actually. So the cold virus you see there in the middle, and then what happened was the cold virus basically infected itself into the cancer cells and it left the the healthy cells alone. And it replicated itself, once it got into those cancer cells, it kept going and going and going. And when they looked at these patients, again these were people they thought had six months to live, and they actually lived for a year.

ZAHN: So looking at the picture, does it actually kill the cancer cell, or just protects the cancer cell from invading the healthy cell?

COHEN: No, it actually seems to kill it. They saw some shrinkage, and they saw the tumor become black and just sort of kind of melt away. The cancer cells, because of a genetic defect that the cells had, they didn't know what to do with the cold virus. If you or I had a cold, we'd get over it and we'd be fine. But these, they weren't fine, they couldn't deal with it. ZAHN: Now, you mentioned the magic number of 28 so far. How available is this treatment?

COHEN: It's not very available. I mean, again, this is very small. This was a study that was done at Stanford and the Mayo Clinic to a very select group of patients, and they think that if this does work out, if this does turn out to be a good treatment, it wouldn't be available for around five years, so we're talking about something that is in the very early stages right now.

ZAHN: Are they far enough along with the research to tell whether there are any dangers to this treatment?

COHEN: Well, they have actually proceeded very, very carefully, Paula, and the reason for that is that you are taking people who are sick to begin with, who have end-stage cancer, and you are infecting them with a cold, which can be dangerous. And in the past, similar kinds of experiments have not ended well. In fact, people have died. And so they're going very slowly, because you don't want to infect someone with the flu, that could be deadly. So they are trying to give them low doses.

ZAHN: But they're always looking for alternatives to chemotherapy which make many, many people sick.

COHEN: Exactly, because chemo and radiation attack the healthy cells as well as the sick, and as you saw in the pictures that we had, this just attacks the sick cells. The healthy ones are fine. They're left alone.

ZAHN: That graphic was very helpful.

COHEN: It helps to picture it.

ZAHN: Even for those of us who don't have the medical knowledge...

COHEN: Right.

ZAHN: ... you could follow that.

COHEN: It helps you picture it.

ZAHN: Well, we wish them luck.

COHEN: Absolutely. We'll follow up with it.

ZAHN: Hope it works. Elizabeth, good to see you in person.

COHEN: Thank you.

ZAHN: It's always nice to have her in New York.

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