'Cancer will be cured,' scientist behind immunotherapy treatment explains how

GREENVILLE, S.C. (WLOS) — A biotechnology company in the Upstate working on the cutting edge of science is striving to eradicate cancer through next-generation immunotherapies.

Catie King is one of those trial patients on the receiving end of that research.

“People used to ask me the question: 'When will there be a cure for cancer?'" Dr. Tom Wagner said. "And I’ve been doing this for 60 years and I would never answer that question. I don’t know. Until recently, until the last three or four or five years.”

Wagner founded Orbis Health Solutions in 2009 after moving to Greenville in the 90s to develop a cancer immunotherapy center.

“The institute that we put together in Greenville years ago, 26 years ago, was specifically to activate the immune system to attack cancer and nothing else," Wagner said.

Wagner got his first cancer grant in 1963 and worked at Sloan-Kettering Institute for years but thought the whole approach to cancer treatment was wrong.

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Speaking to a News 13 crew, he got emotional remembering treating children who were dying of cancer and undergoing high-dose chemotherapy that was only making them sicker.

So, Wagner set out to treat the disease more "logically and compassionately."

“Think about the oath that physicians take -- do no harm," Wagner said. "Do no harm. Chemotherapy is harm.”

Wagner's research uses what he said is the body's best defense: the immune system.

“Our immune system looks at cancer by itself. It says, 'OK, these are a little different, but they’re self so we’re not going to attack them,'” he said.

Wagner said his challenge was to make tumor cells look like a pathogen or a bad guy.

Using his dog's whiffle ball, he explained it.

“So, the idea that we had was to load the inside of this shell (the whiffle ball) with the molecules from the patient's cancer cell so that when this antigen-presenting cell looked at it, it would see pathogen and it would change itself to this io12 profile and it would now take this to lymph nodes and say this is a pathogen and go kill it as opposed to tolerize it when it doesn’t see this shell,” he said.

Patients are treated individually by taking samples from their tumors to make the vaccine.

“You’re not just hoping that, 'Oh, I hope this works for me,'" King, a patient in the trial said. "It’s built for you.”

“It’s more personalized medicine, but cancer is a personalized disease," Wagner said. "You can’t treat a personalized disease with a generic medicine.”

“It’s extremely safe," Dr. Thaer Joudeh, the internist administering the vaccine, said. "It’s safe. And I think it’s going to work.”

Riley Polk, president of Orbis, said he is a believer.

“Our therapy is not something Tom dreamed up in the last six months. He’s been working on it for 25 years,” Polk said.

He's been with the company for 12 years, which was around the time his dad was diagnosed with cancer.

After several surgeries in his lungs, his dad's surgeons told Polk to take him home and get his affairs in order.

Instead, Polk's family opted to use a piece of his dad's tissue and vaccinate him.

“He died. I got goosebumps. He died two years ago, 10 years later, and it did not have anything to do with cancer,” Polk said. “You can tell me a lot of things; you can’t tell me it doesn’t work.”

Polk works on the business side of getting a drug approved. It's an arduous, expensive process, according to Polk.

“We’ve taken our vaccine through a large Phase II B trial," Polk said. "It’s ready for what is called a Registrational Trial for Phase III, but it’s a $100 million project.”

Polk said they hope to start Phase III, which is a three-year trial, this year with around 500 people.

“This is the way medicine should be," Wagner said. "It should make you feel better not worse.”

Wagner, who said he never failed to produce a vaccine for more than 300 patients in a previous melanoma trial, said curing cancer is no longer a matter of science.

“Early detection and immunotherapy will be the cure for cancer," Wagner said. "I’m convinced of that.”

Polk said it costs the company more than $10,000 a patient to treat.

None of the patients participating are charged for the trial.

Orbis partners with a foundation, the Philips-Amick Foundation for Cancer Research, that contributes around $10,000 per patient.

A patient in Wagner's melanoma trial, who had less than six months to live, is alive and well 22 years later. Her story, Thursday on News 13.