Stuff/NZPA: Therapy offers new hope for cancer sufferers

A rabbit virus could hold hope for people suffering with colorectal cancer, say researchers from the University of Otago.

The new vaccine therapy uses a modified form of rabbit calicivirus disease (RCD), and there are hopes that the approach could be modified to target other cancers, too.

An excerpt: (read in full here)

“This therapy uses harmless viral shells derived from RCD, also known as rabbit haemorrhagic disease, to deliver immunising tumour proteins and the same approach could also be applied to a wide range of human cancers, researchers say.

“Mice with induced tumours usually lived no longer than 40 days, but 60 percent of them lived for 80 days or more after a single dose of the VLP vaccine, the researchers found.”