Scientists have modified a common respiratory viruses to destroy cancer cells while leaving healthy unharmed, said a report in tomorrow's issue of Science . The next step - a clinical trial in human cancer patients - is already underway
The cancer killer pathogen is genetically modified lung and a family member of adenovirus .. Biochemist Frank McCormick and ONYX Pharmaceuticals colleagues in Richmond, California, found that the modified virus is unable to replicate in normal cells, but it develops into cancer cells lacking the gene p53 that suppresses tumor growth. The p53 gene, leaving cells vulnerable to the virus when it is out, is one whose loss or inactivation is linked to the development of 50% of human cancers. Consequently, the virus could be widely applicable in the treatment of cancer, particularly because the loss of p53 also allows to make cancers resistant to conventional chemotherapeutic drugs. The modified virus has killed human tumors implanted in mice while sparing normal cells.
`` What I like is how smart he is, '' said Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute. `` It has been a longstanding fantasy to find a [anti-cancer] virus. '' However, he warned that `` not all [new cancer treatment] who is intelligent and focused [to tumor cells] will end up being useful. ''
ONYX team tests the safety of the virus in people with cancer of the head or neck that do not respond to conventional therapies. The tests should be completed in 1997. To date, the virus, which is injected directly into the tumors of patients appears to be safe. But it is too early to say whether the virus has the same ability to kill tumors in humans it has in mice.
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