Amgen has announced miraculous results ,,, use of a virus to treat melanoma, among the deadliest types of cancer!
If scientists accepted the mysterious authority of priests, great events would be seen as miracles. This may be one of those.
All my life as a doctor, I have seen certain cancers as so horrible that they make me fear any God could be responsible for such evil. Melanoma is one of those. I even went through my own episode. Several years afo a black spot started growing in ne eye. I became convinced that it was a melanoma and would not tell anyone or see a physician. Aside from death, I was afraid of the noxious drug therapies melanoma patient’s receive. Finally, I confessed to my wife. The good news for us was that I did not have a melanoma.
Now comes hope in the form of a modified virus, created by Amgen. The drug, known as T-vec, is an engineered virus designed to replicate inside the injected tumor, killing cancer cells there, as well as initiating an the immune response that attacks cancer cells that have metastasized.
The study analyzed 4,000 tumor lesions to study the response to the drug in injected versus non-injected tumors. Of the directly injected tumors, 64 percent shrank by at least half, and 47 percent of those had a complete response, meaning the lesion had disappeared, researchers said. 34 percent of the metastatic lesions also shrunk.
The response in the metastases is especially exciting because it suggests that the virus has elicited an immune response where the patient’s own immune system is attacking the cancer.
Reuters reports that one of the drug’s investigators , Dr. Robert Andtbacka and an associate professor at the University of Utah said, “This is a new generation of oncolytic immunotherapy where you’re seeing very robust responses in injected lesions but also robust responses in non-injected lesions. ”