Post by Galadriel on Apr 2, 2009 22:32:26 GMT
I've been reading a scientific magazine with this interesting article.
Dr. Anthony van den Pol from the university of Yale and his collegues were able to breed a virus that fights the most common and deadliest brain cancer, maligne glioblastoma. The virus is called vesiculair stomatitis virus (VSV) and is being transplanted into the brains of mice who are infected with brain cancer, where it attacked or infects the sick cells without damaging the healthy cells.
The virus works more accurate then the best surgeon's scalpel and have their effect in less then 12 hours after the injection. This treatment has good perspectives because 75% of all cancers have a defect interferon responssystem and can be whiped out with the VSV.
The idea to use virusses against cancer is not new, there is already a measle virus that can fight bone cancer and another genetically manipulated one called the vaccinia-virus JX-594 that is used for terminal cancer patients.
In South Korea a man with a neck tumor has been injected with the JX-594 and his tumor and his tumor shrinked soo much that you can barely see it anymore.
The real effect has to be followed, because the specialists don't know yet if the virus will cause damage by long term.
By tests with mice they injected the virus in the tails to investigate if the blood-brain barrier let the virus through, but in less then 12 hours it had found it's way to the brain and in 36 hours it had spread over almost all the cancer cells to infect them. So far the virus hasn't been tested on monkeys yet, but it has proved to also be able to work on 7 other tumor cel lines like lung- and breast cancer.
If the scientists keep working on it, and prove that the VSV virus doesn't affect the human body, we might soon have found a way to cure cancer.
Dr. Anthony van den Pol from the university of Yale and his collegues were able to breed a virus that fights the most common and deadliest brain cancer, maligne glioblastoma. The virus is called vesiculair stomatitis virus (VSV) and is being transplanted into the brains of mice who are infected with brain cancer, where it attacked or infects the sick cells without damaging the healthy cells.
The virus works more accurate then the best surgeon's scalpel and have their effect in less then 12 hours after the injection. This treatment has good perspectives because 75% of all cancers have a defect interferon responssystem and can be whiped out with the VSV.
The idea to use virusses against cancer is not new, there is already a measle virus that can fight bone cancer and another genetically manipulated one called the vaccinia-virus JX-594 that is used for terminal cancer patients.
In South Korea a man with a neck tumor has been injected with the JX-594 and his tumor and his tumor shrinked soo much that you can barely see it anymore.
The real effect has to be followed, because the specialists don't know yet if the virus will cause damage by long term.
By tests with mice they injected the virus in the tails to investigate if the blood-brain barrier let the virus through, but in less then 12 hours it had found it's way to the brain and in 36 hours it had spread over almost all the cancer cells to infect them. So far the virus hasn't been tested on monkeys yet, but it has proved to also be able to work on 7 other tumor cel lines like lung- and breast cancer.
If the scientists keep working on it, and prove that the VSV virus doesn't affect the human body, we might soon have found a way to cure cancer.
