Sarcomas are relatively rare and difficult to treat. Dr. Jean–Simon Diallo and Dr. Hesham Abdelbary teamed up to see if viruses that have proven effective in other cancer models might also be able to treat sarcoma.

Their comprehensive study involved five different viruses, four sarcoma cell lines and 21 sarcoma samples from patients at The Ottawa Hospital.

They found that the Maraba MG1 virus was best, infecting 80 percent of the human sarcoma samples and nearly doubling the number of long term survivors in an animal model.

Researchers at The Ottawa Hospital, CHEO, McMaster and uOttawa have already initiated clinical trials with this virus in other kinds of cancer, and hope to test it in sarcoma patients in the future.

The study was published in the International Journal of Cancer.