When breast oncologists see new patients, one of their hopes is that the patient doesn’t have triple-negative breast cancer. The subtype is considered particularly dangerous, as it tends to grow and spread more aggressively than other types, and it has fewer effective treatment options. But a small new study suggests that help might come from an engineered virus.
In a Phase 2 trial, published in Nature Medicine on Thursday, injecting early-stage triple-negative tumors with a cancer-killing virus called T-VEC, made by Amgen, during chemotherapy before surgery seems to result in improved survival compared to chemotherapy alone, said Hatem Soliman, a breast medical oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center and the lead author on the study.
Patients also didn’t experience a significant increase in toxicity due to the T-VEC, Soliman said, suggesting oncolytic viruses — engineered cancer-killing viruses like T-VEC — might be safely combined with immunotherapy drugs in future studies. “That’s very exciting because this is something that could be used to improve response to immunotherapy without increasing the severity of autoimmune toxicities that women might experience,” Soliman said. “That’s what we’re really trying to get across with this study.”
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