Human trials for single injection cancer cure to begin

Treating cancer with just one injection? It may sound unbelievable, but an Indian medical institute is soon to start human trials to treat cancer in six weeks through a solitary injection dose.

'It's a single injection dose medicine to treat cancer. If everything goes fine, it will be a novel medical breakthrough,' Kushagra Kataria, chief executive officer of Artemis Health Institute in Gurgaon, told IANS.

'We are set to start human trials in May with a limited number of patients,' said Kataria, a thoracic oncologist.

He said medical scientists will inject 'oncolytic virus' into the human body, which will target the cancer cells and treat patients with much precision and success. Subjects for this trial would be primarily patients suffering from lung, neck and cervical cancer.

Artemis, one of the leading tertiary care hospitals in India, will be conducting the trials in collaboration with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York.

Kataria said animal trials conducted in Britain had given encouraging results. 'The drug has already been tested on mice with human cancer tumours. It has given optimistic results.'

In the current conventional therapy, cancer treatment affects healthy cells along with cancerous cells but in the new treatment, the medicine will not affect any other cells of the body other than the cancerous tumour and cells.

'It will be targeted therapy,' Kataria explained. 'If everything goes well, we believe it will reduce all side effects of the conventional treatment.'

He added that right from finance to time, the treatment will be more human friendly.

While tens of thousands of people die every year due to cancer, India is home to nearly two million patients at any given period of time.