The clash of the viral titans
Soon, there may be an option for cancer patients beyond chemotherapy. How about the option of being treated by a virus?
Pioneering new science is taking formidable health foes—viruses—and giving them a clever twist by employing their proficient services in the fight against cancer.
A couple of researchers who had been studying HIV infection noted a link in the efficiency displayed by HIV cells and cancer cells in getting their respective jobs done. The connection goes deep down to the molecular level to a building block of DNA called dNTP.
Cancer cells hijack dNTP in order to replicate their chromosomes as quickly as possible so they can continually divide, invade, and conquer healthy cells. HIV cells use dNTP in order to make DNA, which allows them to infect immune-system cells that are lacking in dNTP.
The researchers wondered how they could harness a virus like HIV, with its ability to affect those cells without dNTP, and pit it specifically against cancer cells, which require dNTP. The HIV-style virus would bind to the dNTP and then replicate only in those sick cells—thereby destroying them.
Obviously, they couldn’t use HIV to infect cancer patients and see how it worked.
So instead, they took adenovirus, which is a common respiratory virus, and altered it in such a way as to enable it to fulfill the job description: Search and destroy mutant cancer cells.
And when the job is done? The altered adenovirus would then expire.
The altered adenovirus would not contain toxic ingredients, so side effects would most likely be minimal—possibly consisting of just a few flu-like symptoms.
The research team has selected pancreatic cancer to test the altered virus on first, based on that disease’s dismal prognosis. So many folks who undergo chemotherapy become so ill that it sometimes appears as if the cure is worse than the disease. If you’ve experienced it or know someone who has, you know what I mean.
I will keep you updated as the research progresses, and I hope I’ll soon be able to report that chemotherapy is a treatment of the distant past.
