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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."
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
Well, to be fair, Edward Jenner had no sweet clue why cowpox would protect someone from smallpox, but once he figured out how to protect people, it was in his best interests to protect as many people as possible rather than waiting for the full 'why' before doing something.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I think the main part here is that the virus can penetrate the blood - brain barrier. The reason we don't die all from encephalitis during every cold is that the brain is very well screened against infectious agents. So it doesn't really matter what virus we're using for this, it's the fact that the virus can selectively penetrate into tumor tissue that's the importance of the discovery.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Even if you only had a few months left to live?
If I think something is funny, I will probably mod it +1 Insightful. "It's funny because it's true."
One good thing about Brain Cancer, at least from an economic perspective, is that it can be very hard to treat. You can't just remove someone's brain the way you can a breast. I actually new a guy that died from inoperable brain cancer, nothing they could do but make him comfortable.
It *is* profitable to cure someone who has a cancer you can't treat.
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Chemotherapy and radiation treatment tend to do a pretty good job of immunosuppression anyway. If you could develop a treatment with a virus, requiring that the patient be immunosuppressed wouldn't be such a big hurdle.
The virus might attack the primary tumor in mice as a result of its having been surgically disrupted during transplantation. That doesn't affect metastases though. Also, the virus might attack normal human cells while leaving normal mouse cells alone, but someone else pointed out that it doesn't normally infect people.
All in all, quite interesting. You're right though, you can't say for sure until you try it in a real person.
Oh, and FDA inspectors (at least the rank-and-file that I've encountered) are known for being very scrupulous -- they follow an strict inspection procedure that is openly published for examination, and are not allowed to accept even a cheap lunch.
'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
Particularly GBM, which seems to be the tumor they tested this on. The survival rates for that type are currently abysmal, and anything that raises them is welcome, .1% having side effects or not.
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