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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"
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
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.
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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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.
I hate to sound jaded, but it *is* more profitable to treat a disease than cure it.
By and large this is just simply not true, though it gets repeated so much that it becomes "common knowledge" much like the old wives' tale that you'll get pneumonia by going out in the cold (it may make an existing infection worse, but unless you're exposed to the disease itself you won't get it). In most cases, you can charge quite a bit for a real cure, and besides that the insurance companies will refuse to pay for a more expensive long-term treatment if they know that a real cure exists.
There are exceptions of course, particularly in cases where the expense of finding a cure is very high and the disease is uncommon, so that it's not possible for a cure to make much money unless you're able to charge an astronomical amount for it. There are quite a few of these "orphan" diseases which don't get much attention because there just aren't very many people who suffer from them. Naturally both investors and investigators tend to focus on diseases that affect more than a handful of people - which brain cancer certainly does; I lost my wife to a brain tumor, and I've known a number of other people of all ages who have had them, many of whom died from them, including small children.
One thing that you have to keep in mind is that true "cures" are often very difficult to achieve, especially for tough diseases like cancer. If it were that easy, there are thousands of researchers who would leap at the chance to get their names immortalized in the history of science (not to mention any financial rewards they might obtain).
Sorry, I just don't think that this oft-repeated conspiracy theory will stand up to serious analysis.
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.