Cold virus provides cancer treatment hope

British researchers hope that viruses like the common cold may one day provide a new form of cancer treatment.

Teams in both the UK and the US are planning trials this year which should reveal whether or not the viruses could be used to kill tumours.

Lead researcher Professor Leonard Seymour, a gene therapy expert at Oxford University, told the Guardian that the viruses could be "many times more effective than regular chemotherapy".

"If you can get a virus into a tumour, viruses find them a very good place to be because there's no immune system to stop them replicating," he explained. "You can regard it as the cancer's Achilles' heel."

Professor Seymour revealed that only a small amount of the virus would be required, as it would replicate within each cell, eventually bursting the cell wall and enabling the viruses to infect adjacent tumour cells.

He also revealed that the treatment, if effective, could be used against drug-resistance tumours.

Initial trials are expected to involve adenovirus, which causes a cold-like illness, and vaccinia, the virus behind cowpox.

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