Gender representation in leadership roles in UK surgical societies.

Introduction: Despite making up more than half of new doctors, women are underrepresented in most surgical specialties. Various reasons have been suggested for this including issues with work-life balance, discrimination and a lack of female role models in the specialty. We sought to quantify the extent of gender discrimination in leadership roles in surgical societies in the UK.

Oncolytic reovirus as a combined antiviral and anti-tumour agent for the treatment of liver cancer.

Objective: Oncolytic viruses (OVs) represent promising, proinflammatory cancer treatments. Here, we explored whether OV-induced innate immune responses could simultaneously inhibit HCV while suppressing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Furthermore, we extended this exemplar to other models of virus-associated cancer.

Perioperative influenza vaccination reduces postoperative metastatic disease by reversing surgery-induced dysfunction in natural killer cells.

Purpose: Surgical removal of solid primary tumors is an essential component of cancer treatment. Surgery-induced dysfunction in natural killer (NK) cells has been linked to the development of metastases in animal models and patients with cancer. We investigated the activation of NK cells using influenza vaccine in the perioperative period to eradicate micrometastatic disease.

Cytotoxic and immune-mediated killing of human colorectal cancer by reovirus-loaded blood and liver mononuclear cells.

Reovirus is a promising oncolytic virus, acting by both direct and immune-mediated mechanisms, although its potential may be limited by inactivation after systemic delivery. Our study addressed whether systemically delivered reovirus might be shielded from neutralising antibodies by cell carriage and whether virus-loaded blood or hepatic innate immune effector cells become activated to kill colorectal cancer cells metastatic to the liver in human systems. We found that reovirus was directly cytotoxic against tumour cells but not against fresh hepatocytes.

Cell carriage, delivery, and selective replication of an oncolytic virus in tumor in patients.

Oncolytic viruses, which preferentially lyse cancer cells and stimulate an antitumor immune response, represent a promising approach to the treatment of cancer. However, how they evade the antiviral immune response and their selective delivery to, and replication in, tumor over normal tissue has not been investigated in humans. Here, we treated patients with a single cycle of intravenous reovirus before planned surgery to resect colorectal cancer metastases in the liver.