Doctors at NYU Langone Health say a new virus therapy is offering hope to patients without a surgical option.

In clinical trials, a common cold virus combined with an immunotherapy drug infects and kills cancer cells.

Currently, immunotherapies which help the human immune system kill cancer cells only successfully shrink tumors in a third of patients.

The combined treatments successfully shrank melanoma tumors in 47 percent of these patients.

Moreover, eight of the patients taking both drugs went into complete cancer remission with no signs of their skin cancer.

“Our initial study results are very promising and show that this oncolytic virus injection, a modified coxsackievirus, when combined with existing immunotherapy is not only safe but has the potential to work better against melanoma than immunotherapy alone,” says study senior investigator and medical oncologist Dr.

Researchers say these reactions also occur in cancer patients taking pembrolizumab alone.

Researchers will also work with patients whose tumors, if successfully reduced in size by the virus therapy, could be removed via surgery.

“Our goal is to determine if the virus turns the tumor microenvironment from ‘friendly’ to one that is ‘unfriendly,’ making the cancer cells more vulnerable to pembrolizumab,” Mehnert concludes.