Scientists have developed a virus that destroys cancer cells
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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A virus is obtained, which itself finds cancer cells and inhibits the growth of a metastatic tumor, without touching healthy tissues.
Our immune system must monitor cases of cancer degeneration and eliminate cells that have become alien to the body. And one of the conditions for the successful development of the tumor is its ability to suppress the reaction of immunity, to escape from under attack. On the other hand, it is because of this that tumor cells are an easy prey for viruses: the immune system does not know what is going on there and the virus can multiply easily. This could not help pushing scientists into thinking of using viruses to fight cancer.
When developing this method of treatment, the main thing is to be able to teach the virus to search for malignant cells so that after the injection of virus particles they find their own goals without leaving a single metastasis. According to researchers from the company Jennerex Biotherapeutics, they managed to get a virus that itself searches for cancer cells and kills them.
The JX-594 virus, successfully avoiding attacks of immunity, is endowed with a special protein that directs the immune attack on the tumor. Thus, the cancer cell perishes both from the virus itself, which multiplies intensively in it, and from the "awakened" immune system. Ten days after a single administration of JX-594 to twenty-three patients with metastatic cancer, the virus completely infected cancer cells in seven of the eight subjects without any side effects; healthy tissues of a viral infection were not affected. A few weeks later, in half of the participants in the experiment, the tumor stopped growing, and one even decreased in size.
The results of the experiment were presented by the researchers in the journal Nature.
It should be emphasized that this is not the first attempt to make the virus kill a malignant tumor, but here for the first time the fate of the virus, its behavior in the body: how full it infects cancer cells, how successfully it multiplies and does not encroach on healthy tissues.
The researchers intend to create a number of similar viruses in order to "incite" them to different types of tumors.
Colleagues urge authors of the work to pay more attention to the relationship of the immune system with the virus itself. After all, if a virus affects any mutation, and it becomes "visible" for immunity, there will be no trace of the antitumor weapon that will give cancer a chance to return.
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