Virus Engineered to Kill Deadly Brain Tumors

A laboratory-engineered virus has been developed that can find its way through the vascular system and destroy deadly brain tumors.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States alone are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas comprise a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they usually result in death within months.

Dr. Anthony van den Pol, a professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA), reported that current treatments include chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, which can prolong life for a few months, but typically fail because they do not eradicate all of the cancer cells. To assess their tumor-targeting virus, Dr. van den Pol and his team transplanted tumor tissue from human or mouse brains into the brains of mice. They then inoculated the mice with a lab-created Vesicular stomatitis virus, a replicating virus distantly related to the rabies virus.

"Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” Dr. 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.”

The researchers also evaluated targeting brain tumors with the virus through the olfactory nerve and found it led to complete infection of the tumor. After infection, the tumor cells disappeared from the olfactory bulb, according to Dr. van den Pol.

The investigators reported their findings in the February 20, 2008, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.


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