Virus Engineered To Kill Deadly Brain Tumors
Posted on February 24, 2008 Comments (1)
Yale Lab Engineers Virus That Can Kill Deadly Brain Tumors
Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.
…
“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”
Pretty cool. Too bad these press releases never quite live up to the initial promise. Still this one is very cool, if it can succeed in helping even a small percentage of people it will be a great breakthrough. It is also just cool – using a virus to kill tumors – how cool is that?
Related: What are viruses? – Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells – Cancer Cure, Not so Fast – Cancer cell ‘executioner’ found – Cancer Deaths not a Declining Trend – Using Viruses to Construct Electrodes and More
Categories: Engineering, Health Care, Life Science, Research, Science, Students, Universities
Tags: brain, cool, Engineering, Health Care, Research, tumor, using viruses, virus, Yale
One Response to “Virus Engineered To Kill Deadly Brain Tumors”
Leave a Reply
April 23rd, 2008 @ 9:05 am
“Combining a herpes virus genetically altered to express a drug-enhancing enzyme with a chemotherapy drug effectively and safely reduced the size of highly malignant human sarcoma grafted into mice…”