Cancer cells destroyed by designer virus that leaves good cells alone

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 25 Jul 2004 - 12:00 PDT

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A team of scientists at Cancer Research UK have created a virus that targets and destroys cancer cells while leaving good cells alone. They say the cancer cells selfish survival instinct is the reason this new breakthrough works.

Cancer cells do not shut down when they are infected with this virus. Normal cells, on the other hand, do shut down.

You can read about this latest research in the journal Molecular Therapy.

A virus is a good way of carrying anti-cancer treatment straight into a cell. A virus has the ability to enter cells undetected. The problem for scientists has always been being able to enter just the cancer cells and not the good ones.

This team of scientists, from Bart's, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, UK, have managed to engineer a virus that enters only the cancer cells.

They took out a gene from the virus which enables it to enter all cells by stealth. When this virus tries to enter a normal cell, it is detected and the cell destroys itself. This 'suicide' of the good cell prevents the infection and duplication of bad cells.

A cancer cell, on the other hand, does not have this self-destruct button, it wants to survive at all costs. This is great because the virus enters it and replicates within the cancer cells. The replication allows the virus to spread throughout the tumour tissue, leading to the potential destruction of the tumour if toxins are placed in the virus.

Scientists found that the virus spread through the cancer cells like wild fire but left the good cells alone. One of the problems with current chemotherapy is that it is not so targeted, a lot of good cells are destroyed, leaving patients debilitated.

With such good targeting, the scientists say it will become much easier to have highly selective anti cancer treatment.

The scientists plan to place a toxic gene into the virus so that the toxin can destroy the cancer cells. As the cancer will make more copies of the virus anyway, not that many copies of the virus will be needed initially for effective treatment.

The cancer cell does all the hard work by creating more and more copies of the virus, said Professor Lemoine, lead scientist.

When the new treatment becomes available the virus will be injected into the bloodstream, rather than straight into the tumour.

If all goes well, clinical trials should start next year.