A CEO's view on Cancer, Virus-Based 'Cures,'

Thompson understands all too well the challenges of bringing these viruses to market, having guided his company through a sometimes brutal and public quest to develop a treatment that’s similar to the Duke approach. Oncolytics Biotech was founded in 1998 on discoveries made at the University of Calgary about the cancer-killing prowess of reovirus, a bug that most people have been exposed to but that typically doesn’t cause infectious symptoms. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq a couple of years after its founding, while it was conducting early Phase I trials of its reovirus-based therapy, Reolysin, in head and neck cancer.
Thompson remains optimistic, not just about reovirus, but also about polio and the many other virus-based immunotherapy treatments being tried in oncology. In addition to the ongoing research at Duke and other universities, several companies are working in this field, including Amgen , which will face an FDA advisory committee on April 29 to discuss the possible approval of its viral drug, talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC), to treat melanoma. There have been many disappointments along the way, Thompson says, but what scientists are learning from those failures is only strengthening the research efforts.
“Every three or four months we hear about the next cure for cancer coming out of someplace with early data, and 99 times out of 100 you never hear about them again,” says Thompson, himself a scientist who received his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of Western Ontario. The main problem with the 60 Minutes report, he says, was that it focused on early data from one small trial. “One or two patients survived, and yes, that’s exciting, but the daunting task of getting [the drug approved] is lost in translation.”