Along similar lines to the earlier article about a possible cure for HIV, New Scientists has an article about a genetically modified virus which fails to spread in healthy cells but destroys cancer cells. The ingenious part is that the virus takes advantage of the behavior that makes the cell a cancer cell.
Viruses spread by infiltrating the cells of their host. Their detection causes the cell to commit suicide in a process called apoptosis, which prevents the virus from spreading further. However, viruses can carry genes that allow them to slip past this cell death process in normal cells, thus causing infection. As New Scientist reports, researchers at Cancer Research UK and Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London have devised an ingenious new strategy--they deleted one such gene in an adenovirus, causing it to be immediately detected by normal cells and unable to spread. But in cancer cells, which grow uncontrollably and ignore the cell death process, the virus was able to thrive and spread rapidly. It then multiplied so rapidly that it killed the cancer cells by making them explode.
SciScoop || Could This Be The Cure For Cancer?
Posted by bill at June 5, 2004 03:40 PM