Hong Kong, July 4: Terminally ill cancer patients from Europe and America are travelling to China for treatment with a revolutionary anti-tumour drug — the world’s first officially licenced “gene therapy”.

The Chinese government approved the manufacture and use of the drug at the end of last year after clinical trials found that it markedly improved the survival rate for patients with cancer of the head and neck. Doctors are now extending the treatment, named Gendicine, to patients with lung and stomach cancer.

Injected directly into the tumour, Gendicine works by, in effect, programming cancer cells to commit suicide.

About 400 patients — 20 of them from abroad — have been treated with the drug in eight-week courses which cost the equivalent of £1,800.

Peng Zhaohui, a medical scientist who helped develop Gendicine, said: “I believe this revolutionary form of gene therapy represents the future for treating cancer patients. There is still a lot of work to be done, but the results have been very promising so far and — unlike experimental forms of gene therapy attempted elsewhere — there is no evidence of serious side-effects. We have treated foreign patients successfully and word is beginning to spread.”

Peng has been inundated with requests from overseas, including Britain, from patients desperate to try Gendicine. Arthur Winiarski, 48, a Polish-American businessman based in Warsaw, who was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma in his sinuses after a routine medical check-up 18 months ago, was one of them.

After operations, radiotherapy and chemotherapy in Poland, America and Germany, he was told by doctors at a hospital in Berlin that he had almost no hope. “They wanted to get rid of me. The only thing they could suggest was chemotherapy but they and I both knew this does not work with this kind of cancer,” he said.

Then a friend saw a sentence about the new drug on the internet, which mentioned Peng. Winiarski e-mailed a short history of his case to the scientist. To his astonishment, within three hours came a reply: “I think I will be able to help you.”

Still sceptical about his prospects, Winiarski travelled to China and presented himself to Niu Qi, an oncologist at Beijing’s elite Tongren hospital, in April. He was told he needed surgery as well as the drug treatment.

He said: “They inject the drug into the tumour and it goes bananas: it invades itself and commits suicide. My tumour was so big — the size of a fist — that they had to use the drug to shrink it first.”

After further doses of Gendicine, Winiarski was given the all-clear. He said: “To have a life like mine, to be a successful businessman, with everything going well and then all of sudden be told you have months to live — you cannot understand. This experience has been incredible and you could not believe the care I have had. I came here in desperation and they have treated me like a king.”

Gendicine works by inserting a gene, called p53, into a virus, which is then injected into patients. The gene is naturally present in healthy cells but is “switched off” or mutated in many cancer patients. When reinserted into tumour cells by the virus, it triggers their self-destruction.