Human trials using a leukaemia virus to fight advanced skin cancer are on track to start in Adelaide later this year

In a national first, researchers at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s Centre for Cancer Biology intend to tweak the body’s own defensive cells to target cancer by genetically engineering them into search and destroy killers who hunt down tumour cells. Using the body’s own immune system to stalk and kill individual cancer cells is part of a new generation of elegant treatment, contrasting with the ‘sledgehammer’ approach of chemotherapy and radiotherapy which kills healthy cells as well as malignant ones. Senior oncologist Professor Michael Brown is leading the project to genetically engineer a person’s own cells to be cancer assassins, in collaboration with the Cell and Gene Therapy Center, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in the United States. It involves taking a person’s own T-cells – used in the normal immune defence system – and growing them in a laboratory dish. The cells then are infected with virus modified to insert a genetic change...