VIRUSES hitching a lift on the body’s own immune cells could target and kill stray secondary cancers that emerge after the primary tumour has been removed.
The technique, which has been successfully tested in mice, involves screening the patient’s blood along with tissue from the primary tumour for specialised T-cells which home in on the cancer. Once these have been identified and extracted, they are loaded with viruses containing a gene that primes the cancer cells for destruction by making them vulnerable to the drug ganciclovir.
The viruses don’t actually infect the T-cells, but hitch a ride wherever the T-cells go by clinging to the cell surface. Once the T-cells reach their destination, the viruses with their crucial gene “jump off” into the cancer cells. “One of the attractions is that the T-cells will find the tumour for you,” says Richard Vile of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the research.
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He found that the viruses were able to target tumours in mice so that when the mice were treated with ganciclovir, tumours were destroyed in 90 per cent of the mice.
Vile, whose experiments are reported online in Nature Medicine (DOI: 10.1038/nm1297), says that the ultimate aim is to try the procedure out in cancer patients.
