Reprogrammed Virus Offers Hope as Cancer Treatment
News May 25, 2018
| Original story from Cardiff University
A cancer treatment that can completely destroy cancer cells without
affecting healthy cells could soon be a possibility, thanks to research
led by Cardiff University.
The team of researchers has
successfully ‘trained’ a respiratory virus to recognise ovarian cancer
and completely destroy it without infecting other cells.
The reprogrammed virus could also be used to treat other cancers such as breast, pancreatic, lung and oral.
Dr
Alan Parker from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine said:
“Reprogrammed viruses are already being used in gene therapy procedures
to treat a range of diseases, demonstrating they can be trained from
being life-threatening into potentially lifesaving agents.
“In
cancer treatment, up until now, reprogramed viruses have not been able
to selectively recognise only the cancer cells and would also infect
healthy cells, resulting in unwanted side effects.
“We’ve taken a
common, well-studied virus and completely redesigned it so that it can
no longer attach to non-cancerous cells but instead seeks out a specific
marker protein called αvβ6 integrin, which is unique to certain cancer
cells, allowing it to invade them.
“In this case we introduced the reprogrammed virus to ovarian cancer which it successfully identified and destroyed.
“This is an exciting advance, offering real potential for patients with a variety of cancers.”
Once
the virus enters the cancer cell it uses the cell’s machinery to
replicate, producing many thousands of copies of itself, prior to
bursting the cell and thereby destroying it in the process. The newly
released viral copies can then bind and infect neighbouring cancer cells
and repeat the same cycle, eventually removing the tumour mass
altogether. The virus also activates the body’s natural immune system,
helping it to recognise and destroy the malignant cells.
The
reprogrammed virus is from a group of respiratory viruses called
adenoviruses. The advantage of using these viruses is that they are
relatively easy to manipulate and have already been safely used in
cancer treatment.
The technique used to reprogramme the virus to
identify the protein common to ovarian, breast, pancreatic, lung and
oral cancers could also be used to manipulate it so that it would
recognise proteins common to other groups of cancers.
Additional
refinement to the viral DNA could also allow the virus to produce
anticancer drugs, such as antibodies, during the process of infecting
cancer cells. This effectively turns the cancer into a factory producing
drugs that will cause its own destruction.
The research was
carried out in a laboratory, using mice with ovarian cancer, and has not
yet reached clinical trials. The next step is to test the technique
with other cancers, with a view to starting clinical trials in five
years’ time.
Dr Catherine Pickworth from Cancer Research UK
said: “It’s encouraging to see that this virus, which has been modified
to recognise markers on cancer cells, has the ability to infect and kill
ovarian cancer cells in the lab. Viruses are nature’s nanotechnology
and harnessing their ability to hijack cells is an area of growing
interest in cancer research. The next step will be more research to see
if this could be a safe and effective strategy to use in people.”
The
team includes researchers from Cardiff University; the Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, USA; Glasgow University; the South West Wales Cancer
Institute; and Velindre Cancer Centre.
The research was funded by Cancer Research UK, Tenovus Cancer Care and Cancer Research Wales.
The paper ‘Ad5NULL-A20 – a tropism-modified, αvβ6 integrin-selective oncolytic adenovirus for epithelial ovarian cancer therapies’ is published in Clinical Cancer Research.
This article has been republished from
materials provided by
Cardiff University. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.