Vascular Biogenics Ltd (VBLT)

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Promising development - but no CR:: a virus injected directly into the bloodstream can reach tumors deep inside the brain and switch on the body’s own defense system to attack them.
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He said their trial had shown not only that a virus could be delivered to a tumor deep in the brain, but that when it reached its target, “it stimulated the body’s own immune defenses to attack the cancer”.
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In all nine patients, there was evidence that the virus had reached its target, they said. There were also signs that the replicating virus had stimulated the immune system, with white blood cells or so-called “killer” T-cells being drawn to the tumor to attack it.

Because the virus only infects cancer cells and leaves healthy cells alone, patients who received the experimental treatment reported only mild side-effects such as slight flu-like symptoms.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-cancer-virus/immune-boosting-virus-could-be-used-to-treat-brain-tumors-idUSKBN1ES1R3

Intravenous delivery of oncolytic reovirus to brain tumor patients immunologically primes for subsequent checkpoint blockade

Intravenous reovirus associates with multiple peripheral white blood cell subsets in patients
On the basis of the murine experiment results, we recruited nine patients to a phase 1b window of opportunity trial (table S1), where each patient was treated with a single, 1-hour intravenous infusion of 1 × 1010 TCID50 (50% tissue culture infectious dose) reovirus ahead of planned surgical resection of his or her brain tumor. Treatment was well tolerated in all cases, and surgery was undertaken 3 to 17 days after reovirus infusion. The most commonly observed adverse events were lymphopenia (grades 1 to 2 in all nine patients, grades 3 to 4 in six patients) and flu-like symptoms. Median overall survival from the day of reovirus infusion to death was 469 days (range, 118 to 1079 days), which is consistent with the expected survival for this group of patients that have variable cancer diagnoses.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaam7577.full