Australians kill ovarian cancer in mice
By Janelle Miles
February 21, 2005
From: AAP
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12324488-2,00.html

AUSTRALIAN researchers have killed ovarian cancer cells in mice with a naturally-occurring virus, and hope to start human trials within 18 months.
Darren Shafren and Richard Barry of the University of Newcastle found the virus - known as Echovirus type 1 (EV1) - invaded the ovarian cancer by attaching to molecules on the outside of the cells, and then destroyed them.
"The next step is to see what happens when we take real people with real cancers and put the virus into them," Associate Professor Barry said.
Ovarian cancer, which is difficult to diagnose at an early stage, kills more than 800 Australian women each year.
More than 70 per cent of the 1200 Australians diagnosed each year have an advanced stage of the cancer and one in two will not be alive five years after diagnosis.
Professors Shafren and Barry, of the Hunter Medical Research Institute, attracted worldwide attention last year by using a common cold virus - Coxsackievirus A21 - to kill melanoma cells in laboratory tests.
Professor Barry said they hoped the anti-cancer virotherapy would eventually prove an effective treatment for a range of cancers by mopping up leftover cancerous cells once a patient's tumour was removed.
"The big worry for all surgeons is that they've left a bit behind or the tumour has spread somewhere else and it's ... too small, you can't see it," Professor Barry said.
"The theory is that the virotherapy has a potential to ... attack the secondary cancers."
If successful, virotherapy was expected to have few of the side effects that current treatments, like chemotherapy, have because it only attacked the cancer cells.
But Professor Barry said human trials were 12 to 18 months away.
The ovarian cancer research was published in the latest International Journal of Cancer.
Common symptoms associated with ovarian cancer include abdominal bloating, appetite loss or feeling full, constipation, heartburn, back pain, urinary frequency, pelvic pain and fatigue.