The earlier post Adam, Had em pointed to a long history of phage therapies - using viruses to combat bacterial infections. They were largely abandoned in the age of antibiotics in the west but have had recent a resurgence due to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. There's more.

Scientists are discovering that the same qualities that make viruses potent adversaries also make them powerful allies in fighting cancer. Manipulated to seek and destroy hardy cancer cells, viruses have been shown to shrink tumors in animal models and in early human studies...

Although virotherapy has only recently been systematically tested as a cancer therapy, scientists first stumbled on to its promise at the turn of the century. In 1904, doctors in Italy gave the rabies vaccine to a woman who had been bitten by a dog. To their surprise, the woman's cervical tumors shrank.

Forty years later, researchers purposely injected viruses into cancer patients, who responded well to treatment. But the approach remained experimental because of the chance that the virus could infect and kill the patients. It wasn't until the gene therapy era in the 1980s that scientists thought of engineering viruses to kill cancer cells...

There are about 20 virotherapy clinical trials in the US, most of which use adenoviruses as a vector. California-based Cell Genesys is conducting an early-stage clinical trial with an adenovirus vector in patients with early-stage prostate cancer. In partnership with Novartis, Cell Genesys is also conducting preclinical studies of another adenovirus vector for bladder cancer, says Jennifer Cook Williams, a spokesperson for the company.