Source: www.dailyfinance.com Author: Melly Alazraki You'd think that infecting a cancer patient with a virus would be the last thing a doctor would want to do. But what if it was a virus that attacks and kills cancer cells? That's exactly the premise that led to the founding of Oncolytics Biotech, a Calgary-based biotechnology company. It's about to begin Phase 3 trials that could pave the way for a marketable cancer treatment based on this technology in two years, says CEO Dr. Brad Thompson (pictured) in an interview with DailyFinance. "We're working on a product that is widely applicable to quite a few indications of cancer and is based on a naturally occurring virus that's commonly found in the environment and that happens to have a preference of growing in cancer cells as opposed to growing in normal tissue." It's called a reovirus (short for Respiratory Enteric Orphan virus), and it's a type which most people pick up by age 12 through inhalation or contact that causes few or no health problems. But when the virus enters cancer cells, it kills them. On-Off Switch Viruses, naturally, prefer cells that can't fight them off. And these cancer cells all have a common characteristic: They have a certain growth pathway, called the Ras pathway, turned on. "If a cell doesn't have that pathway turned on, nothing happens, so it's like an on-off switch for the virus's growth," Thompson explained. In the human body, very few normal cells have that Ras pathway turned [...]