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."

Comments

Obligatory xkcd

[ericloewe]

http://xkcd.com/938/

HIV too!

[Prien715]

Though the sample size is much smaller, the success rate is much higher. The theory here is different though: the HIV virus infects only T-Cells. T-Cells are responsible for "marking" bodily intrusions as harmful -- but rather than the traditional AIDs payload of "don't attack anything" going into them you alter the HIV virus's DNA to train the T-Cells to kill cancers. So in essence, it teaches your body how to treat cancer as an infection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/health/13gene.html?pagewanted=all

Problem

[wanzeo]

The problem with using living solutions to medical problems (as opposed to drugs) is the high rate of mutation. Perhaps you engineered the virus to kill the cancer cells, but 2 months and 40k generations later it could be doing something completely different.

Bacteriophage

[Hokan]

TFA makes it seem like the concept of pitting viruses against bacteria was developed in the '50s, but research has been ongoing for much longer, at least from 1896.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage