With HIV, TB, Malaria, malnutrition, typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and cholera to contend with, you know Africans shouldn’t be forced to worry about anything else.

Unfortunately, as Africans start to live longer thanks to improved healthcare, diseases usually associated with wealthier nations are starting to make their presence felt.  The UN Global Cancer study, released in 2002, highlighted that over 50% of cancers were occurring in developing countries.  By 2020, they expect that number to go up to 70%.

Yet, because the perception is that cancer is so anomalous in Africa, people are diagnosed very late. “80 percent of cancer victims already have late-stage incurable tumours when they are diagnosed, pointing to the need for much better detection programs,” says the report.  There are over 11 million deaths every year as a result of cancer.

Professor Leonard Seymour of Oxford University, and president of the British Society of Gene Therapy, is optimistic about the future of cancer research.  His stock in trade is in research into the use of lytic viruses to attack and destroy cancer cells.

The current approach to treating cancer is to irradiate the cancer cells in order to kill them.  The radiation causes so much damage to the cells that it triggers their autodestruct mechanism and the tumours will wither and die.

Cancer cells are cells which are created by the body but which “display uncontrolled growth (division beyond the normal limits), invasion (intrusion on and destruction of adjacent tissues), and sometimes metastasis (spread to other locations in the body via lymph or blood).”  In other words, a single cancer cell will rapidly divide, using the body’s own resources, invade other tissues and then spread rapidly throughout the body via the blood system.

By definition, these are cells that are not functioning properly.  They don’t react to signals to shut down and die.  50% of people who are diagnosed with cancer will die anyway simply because, even despite the radiation damage, the cancer cells continue to grow, multiply and spread.

The side effects of treatment cause hair-loss and terrible pain.  The disease is even worse.

“So, what if we turn the strengths of cancer cells into a weakness?” asks Professor Seymour.

That weakness is that cancer cells have no immunity to disease, unlike your normal cells.  A cell that is infected with a virus has a host of tools at its disposal to kill the invader.  At the worst, it can simply kill itself to prevent further infection to others.  Cancer cells have none of these skills.

“We’ve lived with viruses for millions of years.  We know that they are pathogens.  Our bodies are well defended against viruses but, actually, we can use viruses to kill cancer,” he says.

“If you can get something like a common cold virus into a cancer you can have a very good effect.”

Seymour is a leading a team which is engineering an Adenovirus (a virus causing the common cold) to have a therapeutic cancer-killing action.  When delivered to a tumour, the virus lyses (bursts) the cancer cells and spreads rapidly amongst them.

“This is a chemotherapy that amplifies itself within the tumour.  There is no other treatment that does this.”

Onyx, a company which completed early human trials using exactly this approach, injected their virus into head and neck cancer tumours.  In the nodule that was injected, the tumour vanished after three weeks.

With all these factors going for it, a tiny dose of the virus is needed in comparison to standard chemotherapy treatments.  Seymour’s team even selectively bred - using Darwinian evolutionary tactics - a version of their virus that is 30,000 times more effective than chemotherapy.

The problem is getting the virus into the tumour.

“The problem we have is that the cancer that does you in is a metastatic disease,” says Seymour.  In other words, the cancer is spread throughout your body and it is impossible to inject virus into each directly.  This means that the virus will have to be injected into the blood stream and then make its way to the cancers itself.

The next problem is that our bodies are well designed to defend against such attacks.  Within minutes of injection, the therapeutic virus will be destroyed.

Seymour’s research is now into giving the viruses a protective coat that allows them to get to the tumour.  “We find that the alkalinity change once the virus gets into the tumour is sufficient to cause the shell to open and for the virus to do its work,” he says.

This gene therapy approach to cancer therapy is at the apex of scientific achievement; relying on evolutionary theory, genetic modification and advanced chemistry techniques.

In the future, perhaps we will greet a sudden attack of the common cold as a period of joy.  After all, the virus will be curing your cancer.