科学家成功利用疱疹病毒治疗皮肤癌

Tens-of-thousands of people around the world are diagnosed with a malignant form of skin cancer every year.

Lin Davies from the UK is currently one of thousands undergoing treatment after she discovered a lump on her.

Doctors later determined she was suffering from an aggressive, stage three melanoma.

She says the diagnosis came as a shock.

"To find yourself at stage three as a diagnosis - you're presented with stage three, no melanomas on the skin - was terrifying and as you can imagine finding there's so few treatments for it, it's really bad. I had no idea that melanoma skin cancer was as deadly as it is."

However, new research is offering people like Lin Davies new hope.

Kevin Harrington with the Institute of Cancer Research in New York says they're now working with a genetically-modified version of the strain of herpes which gives people cold-sores.

"I think the future will be testing this in other types of cancer which might be very amenable to this kind of treatment. And we've already started combination studies where we're combining this particular virus with other therapies."

A number of trials using the herpes virus to treat skin cancer are already underway in the UK, US, Canada and South Africa.

Professor Richard Marais from the Manchester Institute for Cancer Research in the UK says the new advancements using the herpes virus do show promise.

"It's clearly an advance, it's the demonstration that these sorts of technologies can work and clearly 40 percent of patients are responding - that's a breakthrough. The question really is can we convert those responses into long time responses and perhaps in some patients to cures?"

In the UK, 436 people with inoperable melanoma are part of a trial using the genetically-modified herpes virus treatment.

Among them, around one-quarter have responded positively to the treatment, increasing survival rates by around 30-percent.

However, overall survival rates for those with inoperable skin cancer using the new advancements has been marginal at best.

Still, researchers say they do believe the advancements are a positive step forward, though more testing still needs to be done.

Around 9-thousand people die from skin cancer every year.

For CRI, I am Wang Mengzhen.