WHILE GENE therapy may not be the “magic bullet” in the fight against cancer, it still offers great hope and promise in terms of treatment, according to one of the field’s top specialists.
Noriyuki Kasahara, professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said genetic and cellular therapy would not immediately supplant conventional cancer therapies but when offered in combination with chemo and radiotherapy, it offered patients a distinct advantage.
Prof Kasahara addressed the opening yesterday of the 2009 annual conference of the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy of Cancer (ISCGT), entitled Let’s Talk Treatment, which is being hosted by the Cork Cancer Research Centre at University College Cork this week.
“Gene therapy has been in existence for 20 years but we are just starting to see its efficacy in certain settings.
“This is a sign of great hope and promise for the future and we are quite hopeful that we will see considerable progress as we go forward,” he commented.
Prof Kasahara said the rest of the world was now catching up with the US and Europe in terms of developing new therapeutic approaches to fight cancer. China alone now has more patients in gene therapy clinical trials of various kinds than the rest of the world put together.
He pointed out that in the last five years China had approved the first gene therapy drugs in the world, both of which are virus- based vectors for delivering genes into tumour cells.
“I think we are at the point of understanding the limitations of what we can achieve with gene delivery and certain cell therapies.
“We now recognise that it is not a magic bullet – but then few therapies are – but that there are some distinct advantages of being able to fix or repair things at a genetic level,” said Prof Kasahara.
He pointed out that studies of the two Chinese viruses have shown that patients who are treated with these drugs in combination with chemo and/or radiotherapy do much better than patients treated with the conventional therapies alone.
“We are at a point where we can expect to see clinical trials more carefully designed and targeted to specific patient populations,’’ Prof Kasahara said.
The three-day ISCGT conference is being held in conjunction with the third annual conference of the Irish Society for Gene and Cell Therapy and will also feature a mini-symposium with the Irish Association of Cancer Research.
