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Common Cold Virus Might Kill CancerBy Unregistered Visitors, Section Health
BY- Hindustan Times
British Scientist are preparing to launch trials of a radical new way to fight cancer, which kills tumours by infecting them with viruses like the common cold. Leonard Seymour, a professor of gene therapy at Oxford University will lead the trials. Cancer Research UK said that it was excited by the potential of Prof Seymour's pioneering techniques working with viruses that kill cancer cells directly, while avoiding harm to healthy tissue. "In principle, you've got something which could be many times more effective than regular chemotherapy," he said.
New clinical trial Cancer-killing viruses exploit the fact that cancer cells suppress the body's local immune system. "If a cancer doesn't do that, the immune system wipes it out. If you can get a virus into a tumour, viruses find them a very good place to be because there's no immune system to stop them replicating. You can regard it as the cancer's Achilles' heel." Only a small amount of the virus needs to get to the cancer. "They replicate, you get a million copies in each cell and the cell bursts and they infect the tumour cells adjacent and repeat the process," said Prof Seymour.
Researchers have known that viruses can kill tumour cells and some aspects of the work have already been published in scientific journals.
Prof Seymour's innovative solution is to mask the virus from the body's immune system, effectively allowing the viruses to do what chemotherapy drugs do -- spread through the blood and reach tumours wherever they are. "What we've done is make chemical modifications to the virus to put a polymer coat around it -- it's a stealth virus when you inject it," he said. After the stealth virus infects the tumour, it replicates, but the copies do not have the chemical modifications. If they escape from the tumour, the copies will be recognised and mopped up by the body's immune system. The therapy would be especially useful for secondary can cers, which spread in the body after the first tumour appears. "There's an awful statistic of patients in the west ... with malignant cancers; 75 per cent of them go on to die from these cells," said Prof Seymour. Two viruses are likely to be examined in the first clinical trials: adenovirus, which normally causes a cold-like illness, and vaccinia, which causes cowpox and is also used in the vaccine against smallpox. Both will be disabled to make them less pathogenic, but Prof Seymour said he hopes to use natural viruses.
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