Fighting Cancer With The Common Cold?

Roland Piquepaille writes "After 30 years of work, Saint Louis University researchers have genetically engineered a common cold virus to fight cancerous cells while leaving unaffected healthy ones. They received a patent for this research and clinical tests on humans will start soon, according to this news release. Dr. William Wold, chair of the department of molecular microbiology and immunology, received the patent No. 6,627,190 for his work. Preclinical testing has already been done so clinical trials should start soon. We can only hope they will be successful. This overview contains many more details and references about this potential cure for all kinds of cancer. [Note: this is a very different project from the one mentioned by a previous Slashdot post.]"

Comments

Adding two and two

[kimmop]

Altough this is a good achivement it's no scientific breakthrough. If you're interested please read the description section from the patent It's quite well written and understandable.

There's few things you have to know about viruses and cancer to understand this thing:

First: The viruses (adenoviruses to be specific) work by infecting the host (human) cell and by forcing the host to replicate the viral DNA and to produce the proteins coded in the DNA. After few days of this, a lot of new viruses form inside the host cell and the cell gets broken up (lysed) relasing a lot of new viruses to infect the nearby cells.

Second: Cancer is uncontrolled replication of cells. Actually quite many genes must be deactivated (like p53) and activated (like telomerase) to produce a bad type (neoplastic) tumor. The telomerase is needed in the cancer cells because it extends the ends of the chromosomes in the cell after each replication, thus allowing a cell to replicate more.

Prior art: Some people have taken the promoter (DNA sequence that activates a gene) from human telomerase and put it in an adenovirus (that was mutated to be non-replicating) together with cell-suicide inducing gene. By infecting a cancer cell with this virus, you can kill it nicely if the cell expresses telomerase (i.e. is replicated i.e. is a cancer cell)

The problem with the prior art is that producing non-replicating viruses is difficult and expensive and you have to infect all of the cells more or less individually.

Invention: Use the telomerase promoter to drive a gene required for the DNA replication in the virus. This way the virus will kill (by lysis) the cancer cells and infect the other cells nearby but will not lyse the healthy (telomerase-deactive) cells.

Even though this is not a major scientific breakthrough I still hope this works and think it's clearly worth a patent.

Re:Obligatory

[SEE]

Priorities?

Viagra was designed and developed in a research effort that was originally looking for anti-hypertension drugs, and was later refocused on anti-angina drugs. While the stage II clinical trial showed it was not as effective as hoped, it did discover a curious side effect. The priority was not to create an impotency drug; that was a foruitous side effect of what was otherwise seven years of wasted research and funding.