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A Virus that Attacks Brain Cancer
Ponca City, We Love You writes "In the past few years, scientists have looked to viruses as potential allies in fighting cancer. Now researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice. Using time-lapse laser imaging, the team watched vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) rapidly home in on brain tumors, selectively killing cancerous cells in its path, while leaving healthy tissue intact. 'A metastasizing tumor is fairly mobile, and a surgeon's knife can't get out all of the cells,' says Anthony Van den Pol, lead researcher and professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale. 'A virus might be able to do that, because as a virus kills a tumor cell, it could also replicate, and you could end up with a therapy that's self-amplifying.' It's not yet clear why VSV is such an effective tumor killer, although Van den Pol has several theories. One possible explanation may involve a tumor's weak vascular system. Vessels that supply blood to tumors tend to be leaky, allowing a virus traveling through the bloodstream to cross an otherwise impermeable barrier into the brain, directly into a tumor."
The premise of several of the zombie movies is a brain virus that gets out of control. "I am Legnd", "28 days"
(I just had to).
Palm trees and 8
Doctor: I have good news and bad news. The good news is, your cancer is under remission.
Patient: And the bad news?
Doctor: We gave you rabies.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Hope this doesn't turn out like "I am Legend"
Yes...and it may also mutate, and you'd wind up with a virus that has developed a taste for healthy brain cells. Granted, the chances are slight, but they're not nonexistent. Don't get me wrong...as the husband of a brain cancer victim, I find this development very exciting. I just have a habit of looking on the darker side of things.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
i was going to say a better title for this story would be "when genuine scientific research imitates disposable scifi movie dialogue"
and add one more movie to your list : i saw that bad 2004 "doom" movie starring the rock last night on tnt, and i was having flashbacks to the movie's dialogue with this story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
However, as long as we are on the topic of symbiotic relationships, I've always felt that training domesticated zombies to home in on cancer cells as a delicacy would be pretty effective. Remissions wouldn't be a problem, cause zombies have pretty big appetites.
On a tangent, it upsets me when people talk about how the government shortchanges the field of stem cells, when practically nobody is talking about zombie-centric methods of treatment. I swear, you have all these good ideas and can back them up with sound science, and it is as if no one is listening.
Oh well, maybe one day we can grow up in a world where somebody can truthfully say, "... if it wasn't for the walking dead, I wouldn't be here!"
I got a catholic block.
I'm a little surprised that they injected malignant human cells into mice. These viruses do have a different effect on human cells and mouse cells don't they?
If this does end up working, the procedure would have a substantial problem. It would need to be performed on an immuno-suppressed people or else the virus is 'stamped out' before it has a chance to mount an effective attack on the cancer.
The government only short-changes embryonic stem cell research; adult stem cell research is where it's at anyway. ESR generated tissue needs all kinds of fine chemical control to be made to work almost-right, and then the new host rejects it and needs immune system suppression drugs (hi, liver transplant or ESR liver tissue, we need to package a weak form of induced AIDS with that). ASR on the other hand has found many uses (chemo therapy relies on using stem cells extracted from the patient before therapy to rebuild the now-destroyed bone marrow before you die, for example), and some places like OSIR have managed to generate skin and muscle tissue, or even accurately generate tooth buds for whatever kind of tooth they want (stick this in your gum and it grows into a new tooth, forget about repairing your rotted teeth); plus, it's your genetic material, your organs, your teeth, your skin, your immune system does not care.
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Hopefully this will work well, and spin off some thought on breast cancer and other types. My wife had (or has depending on who you ask) breast cancer and any steps toward a cure are good steps, in my opinion.
...that will probobly never see the light of day. Its kind of sad how often we see hopefuly cancer treatments that either don't make it through clinical trials or simply vaporize. I can understand the reasoning if they don't make it through clinical trials, but the others... well, I hate to sound jaded, but it *is* more profitable to treat a disease than cure it. Not to mention this is a virus so rapid mutation is its raison de etre.
That said though, if many of our food items were new today, the FDA would ban them. No fizzy drinks because CO2 is poisonous. Put a rat in a bucket of CO2 and it dies! Perhaps the FDA etc are a bit too cautious about some drugs and treatments.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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Dr, House rocks!
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
I believe that 6,000 to 12,000 people are diagnosed with this every year and the death rate for GBM is 100% with an average LE of only 4 - 18 months with successful treatment. All joking aside, anything that can help is welcome.
This is not the first virus found that can kill cancer. The "Reovirus" (commonly found in human respiratory and enteric tracts) also seems to work pretty well. See the following: Curing Cancer? Patrick Lee's Path to the Reovirus Treatment and Reovirus to target cancer
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Hunting humans is generally frowned upon in modern society but if we loaded dart guns with anti-tumor brain virus and let hunters track cancer victims through a jungle or something then the patient and hunter could go dutch on the treatment. The patient's give them a good hunt and the hunter bags their prey. The incentive for the patient is that they don't have to pay for any of the treatment if they evade the hunter for 3 days.
In the end the hunter gets a happy picture of a bald person with a dart in their ass as a trophy and the patient gets their expensive treatment. We could handle vaccinations for poor 3rd world kids the same way. Next time Angela Jolie goes to bumbuck nowhere I say we hand her a rifle with MMR shots.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
Several companies are currently working on cancer-killing viruses. The most broadly used technique involves tailoring an existing virus (one that already dwells in the body) to be able to replicate only in cells with cancer-specific genetic defects. This is fairly straightforward because of the known set of changes that enable a cell to become cancerous. One typical target is the cell's self-destruct circuitry - if the self-destruct circuitry in the cell is enabled, the virus activates it, the cell self-destructs, and no further virii are produced. If the self-destruct circuitry is disabled (as in cancer cells) then the virus replicates, destroying the cell in the process, and millions of additional cancer-killing virii are released into the environment.
One of the exciting prospects is systemic treatment, in which cancer-killing virii are released throughout the bloodstream. The cancer-killing virii will 'run into' cancerous cells - even metastatic ones, and destroy them. This is currently in clinical trial with Oncolytics.
For further reading:
http://www.oncolyticsbiotech.com/tech.html
http://www.medigene.de/englisch/ProjektHSV.php
DISCLOSURE: I am invested in both of these companies.
Was this virus developed by a guy whose name is an anagram of "RASALOM"? Because this sounds like the plot for one of F. Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack" novels: Hosts.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
'Anything' that can help is not necessarily welcome. Maybe it can cure the brain cancer. But who says it doesn't develop into a virus that ends up killing more people per year than the brain cancer was killing?
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
Operator: Somebody set up us the virus!
It's in the virus's best interest that the host survive. Therefore, a virus that heals the host rather than harming, is more likely to live and infect more hosts.
This development makes me wonder whether we already have other natural, benign viruses helping us out.
Possibly the best idea since Thalidomide.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
The virus is hungry. It needs "brrrraaaiiiinnnnnzzzz".
Anyone here ever played "Stubbs the Zombie". That was one funny game.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I hope I live long enough to see clinical trial of this... and see them go vastly wrong. A zombie plague would be the absolute best thing that could happen to this planet.
Human brain cancer in mice? Are all brain cancers the same, and thus it should be "brain cancer in mice," or do mice have a similar kind of brain cancer to humans?
This sorta research is the exact sorta research one would expect to be conducted for the purposes of biological warfare.
What weapon could be better than a weapon which can infect a nations leaders and drive them all insane?
These insane leaders would still keep their power, and would pass laws which are less and less sane, and do things which are less and less sane.
If it is airborne, it would be the ultimate bioweapon.
The individuals, terrorists, or nations that launch the weapon would probably immunize themselves, and then spread it. By the time the virus is detected by the host nation, it would be too late.
Lets be real, theres not enough focus on preventing biological warfare, or bioterrorism, and we all know that it's possible. Just look at what happened in the recent Ricin scare.
I remember a number of years ago when I lived in New Mexico there was an outbreak of Vesicular stomatitis in cattle and horses. A friends horse ranch was quarantined for a while due to several their horses becoming infected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesicular_stomatitis_virus
"researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice."
Finally those poor mice will be free from the scourge of human brain cancer!
Live viruses have been used for medical purposes already though. Vaccina, a strain of virus related to smallpox, is administered to vaccinate against smallpox. More importantly, I've heard about attempts to treat brain tumors by applying modified herpesvirus to infect the tumor cells, then using an anti-herpes medication. Not sure how those trials went.
This development makes me wonder whether we already have other natural, benign viruses helping us out.
I do remember there being some conjecture that certain DNA elements may have started out as viral elements. I've never heard of those elements or viruses having a beneficial effect.
Among mice in the wild, there is a virus that is usually inherited at birth (can't remember the name). When it is inherited at birth, it has no known negative effect. If a mouse is born without the virus and is not exposed to it until adulthood, the mouse will mount an immune response to it that is lethal (to the mouse).
I put my faith in nanotechnology for cures to diseases of any sort, far more than in anti-disease viruses (note to potential nitpickers: cancer is listed as a disease).
Viruses mutate and become things you do not expect them to. Known fact. To proceed with a cancer-killing virus is to drive all of humanity over one long IED-infested road of epidemiological Russian Roulette.
Of course, nano-robots can bring about the gray goo scenario, but that's more easily controlled than, say, a runaway virus. Nano-robots can be shut down and can, from the outset, be programmed to follow a predictable blacklist strategy and not friggin deviate. Reliability is quite possible and quite often demonstrated in robotics (as long as MicroSoft doesn't get control *ducks*).
On the contrary, there is never any level of trustworthiness or reliability when it comes to any microbe that we might attempt to employ for our benefit. There is only the temporary illusion of such. Inevitably they all mutate somewhere into parts[mutations] unknown.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
No way I'm going to replace this with my pot.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well, for one, the patient could die of brain cancer.