China approves new anticancer drug for clinical tests

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A new anticancer drug capable of lysing cancer cells has been granted approval to enter clinical trials in China, the drugs developers said Wednesday.

The virus can directly deliver PD-1 antibodies within the tumors, leading to immunogenic death of tumor cells, a process that will lure in activated T-cells to kill more cancer cells, researchers said.

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Researchers with Xiamen University said they constructed a new-generation oncolytic virus, encoding PD-1 antibodies, that boasts a higher cure rate on tumor-bearing mice.

The drug, jointly developed by Xiamen University and two Chinese companies, is the latest attempt to use oncolytic virotherapy to treat a number of solid cancers, including head-neck carcinoma, lung cancer, colorectal cancer and liver cancer.

Further studies show the virus eliminates the local tumor and distant tumor by stimulating the antitumor immune response, and the cured mice were found to have a long-term antitumor immune memory and can resist the re-attack of the same tumor cells.

Oncolytic virotherapy is an immunotherapy that lyses, or destroys, cancer cells and releases tumor-associated antigens that will stimulate the patients immune response.