I Am Legend...could it happen?

[loudcherokee]

TRAINING A COLD TO KILL CANCER ; SCIENTISTS TESTING TWEAKED VIRUS ON TUMORS

TOM PAULSON P-I reporter
1098 words
04/07/2008
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
FINAL
B1
English
© 2008 Hearst Communications Inc., Hearst Newspapers Division. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

Researchers at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are trying to trick a strain of the cold virus into killing several kinds of cancer, including a notoriously difficult-to-treat brain tumor.

"There are not many options out there for these patients," said Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem at Fred Hutch, noting that most people with this kind of tumor, glioblastoma multiforme, die within a year of diagnosis.

So far, the scientists have only been able to use the viruses to attack the brain tumors in mice.

The concept of employing viruses as biological anti-cancer smart bombs, though it may sound bizarre, has been around for quite a while.

"It's not a new idea," said Dr. Andre Lieber, a researcher at the University of Washington and a leader in this field. But Lieber and others are using innovative genetic techniques to retrain the common cold virus, known as adenovirus.

Some say the notion of enlisting infections to fight cancer first took hold back in 1912, when a rabid dog bit an Italian woman who had advanced ovarian cancer. Italian doctors injected the woman with a weakened rabies virus, a vaccine, to protect her against the deadly infection. And after the immunization, to everyone's surprise, her aggressive ovarian tumor also shrank back.

This is often cited as the first scientific report of the possibility that viral infections or vaccinations might somehow work against cancer. There had been earlier anecdotal stories about people with cancer being cured after getting this or that bug, but not much hard evidence.

"It wasn't until the 1950s and '60s that it really took off," Lieber said. Scientists in the '50s and '60s tried injecting cancer patients with all sorts of live viruses such as mumps or the cold virus, he said, but without really knowing exactly what was going on inside the body.

If you consider what cancer really is and what viruses do, it makes perfect sense. Cancer is the uncontrolled proliferation of cells in the body. Viruses selectively kill cells.

"The trick is to make them kill only the cells you want them to kill, the cancer cells," Lieber said.

Lieber, Kiem and their colleagues have focused on a strain of cold virus, adenovirus serotype 5 (or Ad5). The cold virus achieves its purpose in nature by injecting its genes into our cells, forcing our nasal passage cells or whatever else is infected to produce new viral offspring. Eventually the nose or lung cells that are infected burst, which helps explain why we cough and our noses turns red.

Catching a cold means your cells have been hijacked. Lieber and Kiem, in turn, are hijacking the cold virus to redirect it against cancer.

"Andre has modified the viruses so they can selectively target the tumor cells, replicate inside them and kill them," Kiem said. "And they can only replicate inside the tumor cells."

Though the research is limited to mice in the U.S., Lieber is working with British researchers to do clinical testing soon of his modified cold virus in a dozen people with late-stage, incurable colon cancer.

There are still plenty of obstacles, however, to making this an approved cancer therapy - beginning with the immune system's tendency to fiercely attack and destroy viruses.

"That's a big problem," Lieber said. One way to get around it, he said, is to use immune-suppressing drugs until the anti-cancer virus finishes its attack on the tumor.

Another concern is that the virus could stimulate an adverse immune response in the patient, he said, or that the altered virus would evolve and revert to its disease-causing natural "wild type" - or perhaps turn into something even worse.

"Andre is an incredibly creative guy, but he does tend to focus on problems," joked Dr. Stephen Russell, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., widely considered one of the world leaders in the field known as oncolytic (cancer-killing) virotherapy.

Russell and his team have altered measles viruses to attack ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and glioblastoma, and have recently launched early stage human trials.

"It's no longer a question of whether virotherapy will work so much as it is a question of what we still need to do to make it work better," Russell said.

After the field's long history of fits and starts, the Mayo Clinic scientist is nevertheless concerned about anything that might once again send this avenue of inquiry back into hibernation.

When his 17-year-old daughter came home one night to report that she just saw the movie "I Am Legend," in which Will Smith is a scientist who alters a measles virus that creates zombies and kills everyone in Manhattan, Russell was concerned.

"I thought, `Oh no, here we go,'" he said. "We're at a very vulnerable stage in development, just moving into early stage human trials."

Russell and his colleagues monitored the Internet to see what people said about this Hollywood movie that had the altered measles virus creating zombies and depopulating New York City. Fortunately, few saw any reason to storm the Mayo Clinic and demand that the science stop. "It may have helped that the movie was pretty cheesy," Russell said.

Despite his reputed tendency to see most glasses half empty, Lieber believes the new genetic and molecular biological techniques available today do promise to finally make virotherapy an effective, incredibly accurate and safe way to rid the body of cancer.

"These viruses have evolved over millions of years to figure out how to get into cells," he said. "They have an inherent ability to take over specific cells and kill them."

P-I reporter Tom Paulson

can be reached at 206-448-8318

or tompaulson@seattlepi.com.

EXISTING CANCER THERAPIES

Surgery - Removing the tumor or cancerous mass is the simplest way to treat a cancer, but it only works if the cancer cells have not spread significantly.

Chemotherapy - Using drugs to kill cancer cells reaches throughout much of the body, but also kills or damages many healthy cells.

Radiation therapy - Using ionizing radiation to kill cancer cells is less invasive than surgery and more targeted than chemo, but still can cause damage to healthy tissue and miss some of the cancer.

Biological therapy - Using vaccines, antibodies or other kinds of immunity-prompting "antigens" to stimulate an immune system storm that targets cancer cells. Still a relatively new but growing field.

[XUSNORDY]

As if we are not paranoid enough with protecting the 2A.....geez.

[Longshot]

Time to build the bunker.

[Brown-Bear]

I guess it could and probably will. Albeit not like the movie, but nature has a way of thinning things out so to speak. The influeza epidemic, plauge and so forth. If person were to come up with a virus like KV(from the movie) that would still be nature replenishing itself. Mans ability to stave these events off for the short term only serve to make the inevitable more devestating when it finally does happen. I personally am not worried. God has already fixed a time and place for my death as well as yours. All any one can do it is try to live to the fullest and meet his/her end in wahtever way suits them the best.

BB

[spabula]

IIRC when I was at a seminar for biological safety. there was a women who held a presentation on using viruses as vehicles for curing disease. I believe her perticular studies were for some type of illness that makes people blind. I believe they were successful in using this treatment in a blind dog to cure such disease. This was a few years ago so I'm sure they are way ahead of that now. When viruses are used as a "vehicle" I think they then are called vectors. So do I think something like this could happen.... possibly, but without the cool zombie like stuff

[JoeWilliams]

http://zombietargets.net/

Time to start training!!

[justashooter]

one credible theory on the origin of AIDS supposes that it is a mutated form of BIDS (bovine immunodeficiency syndrome) that species jumped when beef tissue was used to culture small pox vaccine for distribution in africa in the 50's.

what is known for sure is that the belgian nuns vaccinating africans in the congo used needles without sterilisation on multiple innoculees until the needles broke, guaranteeing that if there was an existing AIDS virus in the local population, it was spread by the smallpox innoculations. sterilisation in an autoclave is not enough to remove AIDS virus from a used needle, so get a new one every time.

AIDS is rampant in africa and readily transmissable by heterosexual intercourse. this is in part related to the high incidence of malaria, which reduces resistance to aids and lowers the exposure threshold.