Academy Fellow Professor Sharad Kumar in involved with human trials using a leukaemia virus to fight advanced skin cancer that are on track to start in Adelaide later this year.
In a national first, researchers at the Royal Adelaide Hospital's Centre for Cancer Biology intend to tweak the body's own defensive cells to target cancer by genetically engineering them into search and destroy killers who hunt down tumour cells.
Using the body's own immune system to stalk and kill individual cancer cells is part of a new generation of elegant treatment, contrasting with the 'sledgehammer' approach of chemotherapy and radiotherapy which kills healthy cells as well as malignant ones.
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