OTHER BREAKTHROUGHS NOW CHANGING LIVES...

OVARIAN CANCER INHIBITOR DRUG

ONLY about a third of women survive ovarian cancer for a decade or more. However, the NHS’s introduction of a new drug, called niraparib, is bringing significant new hope for women with recurrent ovarian cancer.

The drug is a PARP inhibitor, which works by stopping cancer cells from repairing themselves. The charity Target Ovarian Cancer is calling it a ‘game changer’.

PARALYSED PATIENTS WALKING

SEVERE spinal-cord injuries may no longer mean paralysis, thanks to a prototype system which uses electrodes that send electronic pulses into patients’ spines to stimulate their leg muscles.

In June this year, Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, told the Science Unlimited conference in Montreux how two patients can now walk short distances on crutches, thanks to electronic ‘booster’ pulses.

‘CURE’ FOR AGERELATED BLINDNESS

AGE-RELATED macular degeneration (AMD), the UK’s most common cause of sight loss, may be curable. In February, researchers at the University of Oxford reported how they had injected a solution which carries a virus containing modified DNA into the eye of a patient with ‘dry’ AMD.

The virus infects cells called the retinal pigment epithelium thereby correcting a defect that causes sight deterioration.

BRAIN DISEASE BLOCKED

HUNTINGTON’S disease relentlessly destroys people’s brains. Now the DNA defect behind it has been blocked by researchers at University

College London. They’ve been testing a drug, RG6042, that cuts levels of lethal proteins that destroy nerve cells.

In May, the New England Journal of Medicine reported its first successful use in human patients. The drug is in global trials.

TREATING CANCER THAT’S SPREAD

PATIENTS whose cancers have spread to a point previously considered incurable have new hope thanks to a high-precision form of radiotherapy being trialled at Glasgow’s Beatson Cancer Centre and reported in The Lancet in July.

The approach, called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, has been shown in tests on 99 patients to effectively target tumours that have spread: in some cases, patients’ cancers have been declared eradicated.

HIV INFECTION CLEANED OUT

IN MARCH, University College London researchers announced that they had cleared a patient entirely of his HIV infection, leaving him ‘functionally cured’.

The virologists reported in the journal Nature how the patient had received stem cells from a donor who had a rare genetic resistance to the disease.

EBOLA MADE PREVENTABLE?

THE lethal Ebola epidemic in Africa struck in 2014, but two new drugs are improving survival rates so that the disease may soon be classified as ‘preventable and treatable’.

In August, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported that the drugs REGN-EB3 and mAb114, which attack the Ebola virus antibodies, have shown a 90 per cent survival rate in trials.