Rabbit Poxvirus Kills Brain Cancer Cells

Researchers have used myxoma virus, a poxvirus that causes fatal myxomatosis in rabbits, to kill human brain cancer cells both in tissue culture and after transplantation into mice.

After earlier studies showed that the mxyoma virus could survive in a variety of human tumor cells in culture, investigators at the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada) and the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) performed a series of experiments designed to test its effectiveness against a human malignant brain cancer (glioma).

They reported in the November 1, 2005, issue of Cancer Research that when used to infect eight different glioma cell lines growing in tissue culture, the myxoma virus reproduced in seven of the lines and killed the cells.

In another series of experiments, a mouse model was created by transplantation of human glioma cells into the animals' brains. The growing tumors were then treated by being inoculated with either live myxoma virus or with myxoma virus that had been inactivated by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light. All the animals treated with UV inactivated virus were dead after about 50 days, while 92% of those treated with the live virus were still living when the experiment was ended after 130 days. The virus itself had no apparent toxic effects on the mice.
"Those animals continued to show a selective and long-lived myxoma virus infection in the tumors themselves but that infection did not spread and harm the animal,” explained senior author Dr. Peter Forsyth, professor of oncology, biochemistry, and molecular biology at the University of Calgary. "This and other factors suggest that myxoma virus warrants further investigation as a potential treatment for malignant brain tumors in people.”




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University of Western Ontario
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