Polio was a devastating disease before the development of the polio vaccine. But now, this once-feared virus might help treat another deadly illness - brain cancer. In a new study, some patients who had an aggressive type of brain cancer called glioblastoma and who received a genetically modified poliovirus lived much longer than typical for these patients. The study found that about 21 percent of the brain cancer patients who received the poliovirus therapy were alive three years later. In contrast, among a group of previously treated patients who had the same cancer but received standard therapies (such as chemotherapy), just 4 percent were alive after three years. Still, the new study was small and wasn't designed to determine exactly how effective the poliovirus therapy is, so future studies are needed to look at this question, the researchers said. What's more, it appears that most patients in the study didn't respond to the new therapy at all. But the researchers said that the new results are promising and that they plan to conduct more studies to see if they can increase the percentage of patients who benefit from the treatment. “Glioblastoma remains a lethal and devastating disease," senior study author Dr. Darell Bigner, emeritus director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at the Duke Cancer Institute, said in a statement. "There is a tremendous need for fundamentally different approaches" to treat the disease, Bigner said. "With the survival rates in this early phase of the poliovirus therapy, we are encouraged and eager to continue with the additional studies that are already underway or planned." The study was presented on Tuesday (June 26) at the International Conference on Brain Tumor Research and Therapy in Norway and was simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine. New treatment for a deadly cancer People with glioblastoma - the most common type of cancerous brain tumor in adults - typically live less than 20 months after their diagnosis, the researchers said. And patients with a recurrence of this cancer (meaning the cancer appeared to go away and then came back) typically survive less than 12 months.