Professor Tomonori Todo and his colleagues at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, Department of Brain Tumor Surgery, have announced that they will begin clinical trials of viral therapy for malignant pleural mesothelioma, which is mainly caused by asbestos.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma is a malignant tumor that mainly occurs in the thoracic cavity and is thought to be mainly caused by asbestos.Asbestos was widely used in the 1960s and 1980s, and malignant pleural mesothelioma develops 30 to 40 years after inhalation exposure, so there is concern that the number of patients will increase in the next few decades.
Professor Todo et al. Will develop a third-generation herpes simplex virus type 1 G47Δ for cancer treatment and use it for viral therapy for malignant pleural mesothelioma.Virotherapy is a new type of cancer therapy that uses a virus that has been artificially modified to grow only in cancer cells. The virus begins to grow as soon as it infects the cancer cells, and the cancer infected in the process. Kill cells.Until now, the method of directly administering the G47Δ virus to the tumor has been used, but since malignant pleural mesothelioma is a tumor that spreads widely in the thoracic cavity and increases, the method of administering it into the patient's thoracic cavity for the first time is used. ..The purpose is to investigate the therapeutic effect as well as the safety of repeated intrathoracic administration.
If the safety and therapeutic effect of repeated intrathoracic administration are confirmed in this clinical study, it will be applied not only to malignant pleural mesothelioma but also to intrathoracic or intraperitoneal dissemination of cancer for which there is currently no effective treatment. Expectations for the application of G47Δ to treatment are increasing.
