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Gift horse
According to "The Iliad", the Greeks won the Trojan War by introducing a few dozen soldiers into the city of Troy inside a giant wooden horse disguised as a surrender gift. The men waited until nightfall to get out of the horse and open the gates of the city to the rest of the Greek army, which destroyed Troy and ended the war.
It was not the most direct battle plan, but it worked. And now, British researchers are using a similar tactic in the fight against hard-to-treat cancers – with extremely promising results.
Winner TV
Researchers from the London Cancer Institute (ICR) and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have created a new anti-cancer drug, tisotumab vedotin (TV), which combines a chemotherapy agent with an antibody.
This antibody binds to markers located on the surface of a cancer cell so as to attract chemotherapy into the cell – which then attacks the cell from the inside, just like Greek soldiers attacking Troy .
"This treatment is so exciting that its mechanism of action is completely new," ICR researcher Johann de Bono said in a press release. "It acts like a Trojan horse to get into the cancer cells and kill them from within."
Last resort
On Thursday, researchers published details of a clinical trial on television in the journal Lancet Oncology.
This trial involved 147 patients with various cancers, including cancers of the ovary, cervix and esophagus. For the majority of participants in the trial, the cancer was already advanced and had shown resistance to several other types of treatment.
According to the press release, a "significant minority" of test participants saw their tumors contract or stop growing as a result of treatment with the new anti-cancer drug. The positive response lasted on average 5.7 months, but some patients went there 9.5 months before the effect of the TV.
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