Word: onyx
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Frank McCormick was flying home from a meeting on cancer genetics when a wild idea popped into his head. What if you could make a virus that would infect-and kill-cancer cells but leave healthy cells intact? The next day, McCormick excitedly explained his notion to colleagues at Onyx Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company he had founded earlier that year. Some of them were as enthusiastic as he was. Others told him he was crazy; such a treatment couldn’t possibly work...
Nine years later, McCormick, now the director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, has proof of his sanity in the form of Onyx-015, a virus that works exactly as he envisioned. Last year the company reported results of a clinical trial in which Onyx-015 injections, in combination with chemotherapy, melted away tumors in eight out of 30 patients with recurrent, late-stage head and neck cancer. In another study involving 27 patients whose cancers had metastasized to the liver (a condition that usually kills in six months), 11 were still alive nearly...
GENE THERAPY WITH A TWIST Scientists have used a genetically modified cold virus, Onyx-015, to battle head and neck cancer. While traditional gene therapy aims to replace defective genes, Onyx-015 trades on the genetic difference between cancerous and normal cells to hunt and kill only the cancer. In a study, 63% of 30 patients who received Onyx-015 along with chemotherapy saw their tumors shrink by at least half. After five months, none of the tumors had grown back. Doctors hope that Onyx-015 will also prove effective against ovarian, pancreatic and other aggressive cancers...