This is an inspiring story. But "The full article is published in the May 5, 2014 issue of People magazine, and is available by subscription or for purchase at the People magazine website" doesn't inspire confidence in the treatment method, as that is not how clinical medical findings are peer-reviewed. The submission kindly made here is a press release from a medical school press office.
As I search the doctor's name on Google Scholar, I see that he has had various journal publications on various aspects of investigating or treating brain disease for a long time. His research into using polio viruses as agents for treating tumors has attracted some notice in published books, but this is not yet a mainstream treatment. It will be interesting to see if a larger number of patients, seen by doctors other than Matthias Gromeier, also benefit consistently from this kind of treatment, which is now experimental and ethical to use in human subjects only in the most desperate cases.
Of course the human work will be peer-reviewed, but the study is in the early stages and still ongoing. They have an IND (investigational drug) protocol approved by the FDA to conduct the trial, and the trial is overseen by panels at both the institutional and federal level.
The point of pieces like this is essentially to attract patients to the trial (both directly and by making referral providers aware) so that the science can be validated. Perhaps surprisingly, there are a large number of active trials in the country and relatively limited numbers of patients who meet inclusion criteria. So to some degree the big centers have to compete for enrollment. (secondarily, they hope to attract donors for future work in this and other areas; this kind of risky pilot work is heavily seeded by institutional money, before NIH will get involved)
"PVS-RIPO, the prototype oncolytic poliovirus recombinant, was FDA approved under an Investigator-initiated Investigational New Drug application (IND no. 14,735). Clinical trials in patients with glioblastoma multiforme are currently recruiting patients (clinicaltrials.gov trial no. NCT01491893)."
As I search the doctor's name on Google Scholar, I see that he has had various journal publications on various aspects of investigating or treating brain disease for a long time. His research into using polio viruses as agents for treating tumors has attracted some notice in published books, but this is not yet a mainstream treatment. It will be interesting to see if a larger number of patients, seen by doctors other than Matthias Gromeier, also benefit consistently from this kind of treatment, which is now experimental and ethical to use in human subjects only in the most desperate cases.