Question: what gave you such an innovative idea?

Louisa Chard answered on 21 Jun 2010:

The use if viruses to kill cancer has been around as in idea since the beginning of the 1900s. A docotr noticed that some of his cancer patients, who had viral infections also sometimes showed cancer remission. Since then, from about 1912 we have been playing around with viruses to try and create a safe and effective treatment. However, although the idea has been around for a long time, it’s only really in the last 10-15 years that we;ve gone back to it as it has been very difficult to create a treatment that works on the majority of patients, not just the lucky few. More recently we have begun to get a much much better understanding of the viral lifecycle and how it replicates so we can manipulate them to only replicate in cancer cells. Also, we have only just begun to understand the role of the immune system in cancer treatment (it seems that tumours secrete molecules that prevent the immune system from working and recent evidence shows that the better the immune system the better the survival rate). That’s the thing about science, it’s not only about finding cures, its more about understanding how systems work, the more we understand, the better we can manipulate them to find cures for disease.