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Killing Cancer With Engineered Viruses
techfun89 writes "Viruses can make us all sick, but one day could be engineered to defeat cancer. Cancer cells have one trait that may leave them open to attack. They aren't good at killing off viral infections, hence, at least in theory, you could use a virus to kill cancer cells without affecting the patient. Dr. Ian Mohr, a virologist at New York University, altered the herpes virus so that it isn't attacked by the immune system and kills cancer cells more efficiently. Another virus that is proving effective for liver cancer is Vaccinia. Vaccinia is used to protect against smallpox and so far the results have been promising. Several groups of patients have had an increase in survival times. Meanwhile other viruses are being used for things like melanoma, bladder cancer, and head and neck cancer."
Here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/health/research/viruses-are-recruited-and-flipped-as-cancer-killers.html?_r=2&ref=science
Sounds interesting (especially as somebody who is at high risk for melanoma).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No. This has already been done with HIV, and although the trial was small, the success was remarkable. They use the invasive traits of the virus with none of the nastiness. It's incredibly promising, so much that we may well have a cure (or at least a damned good treatment) for cancer within the next decade.
Dr. Bell at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, http://www.ohri.ca/profiles/bell.asp. He's been researching and using viruses to treat cancer in liver cancer. I believe it is currently in clinical trials in Europe and showing promise to not just kill cancer cells but cut off blood flow to the tumour which also helps to 'starve it'.
Two went into complete remission. One saw a major remission, but it was not total. I'd say that's pretty damned promising, especially when one of the cured ones was perhaps a month or two away from the grave.
Just to shut down this line of reasoning: it requires a large number of genes for a virus to reproduce, which the researchers remove completely to make room for the more useful payload. In the case of the HIV-based study being described, that payload rewired one class of immune cells to identify another class of immune cells (which included the cancerous ones) and destroy them. Viruses crippled in this way can't spontaneously develop the ability to reproduce any more than a human eunuch can. Mutations occur during reproduction, which medically-engineered viruses have no opportunity for doing.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It can't. Viruses mutate when they reproduce. These viruses have all of the genes for reproduction removed. They're essentially eunuchs.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
All viruses used in this manner are wired not to reproduce. It means you need to inject a lot more copies of the virus, but there's no chance of mutation in a virus that can't reproduce. And no, they can't spontaneously redevelop the huge number of genes necessary to reproduce; they don't even have the opportunity to do so. It's completely safe. They're just DNA injectors, and we're exploiting the side-effects that the viruses normally bundle with their (deleted) reproductive payloads. In this case, healthy cells are smart enough to fend off the infection, but cancer cells aren't, which is why they're cancerous in the first place.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
From the latin vacca, or cow.
Because the first steps towards a smallpox vaccine were based on the realisation that dairy workers who had contracted cowpox were immune to smallpox. Vaccinia is very closely related to cowpox, but has diverged from it slightly since the its widespread use as a vaccine.
Because it was so successful as a vaccine, the name vaccination stuck.
Miss that part of the story, and it's nowhere near as interesting.