Will Zika cure cancer?

Semyon Kvasha, Copper News

British scientists (real, at the University of Cambridge) said they would try to treat brain tumors with the Zika virus. Mice with glioblastoma, the most common brain cancer, will be infected with the Zika virus and will be treated with laboratory drugs in parallel.

The consideration presented by the researchers (in the press release of Scientists to test Zika virus on brain tumours - VM) is not very complicated: the virus is really dangerous for newborns and young children (as well as for pregnant women; they have a significant chance of giving birth to a child with microcephaly), and for adults it is practically safe, causing symptoms similar to a common cold.

Glioblastoma cells resemble cells of a growing brain, says Harry Bulstrode from the University of Cambridge, and therefore there is hope that the virus will attack them without touching the formed cells of an adult.

"Zika in children and infants is a global health problem, and so far the main research has been trying to figure out the nature of the virus and find new ways to treat it. We have a different approach, and we are trying to find out if it is possible to incite Zika on one of the most difficult-to-treat cancers. We hope to show that zika can stop tumor growth in the laboratory. If we learn something from a virus that can overcome the blood-brain barrier and selectively attack brain stem cells, we can get the key to therapies of the future," Bulstrode said.

This story looks pretty wild: to treat one terrible disease with another terrible disease. But in fact it is very old. At the beginning of the twentieth century, drug addiction was treated with typhus and any other infections, in which a person spent a lot of time in oblivion and thus experienced withdrawal. So, for example, Mikhail Bulgakov was cured. Allergies were treated with tapeworm and other parasites: the body's excessive immune response turned to external stimuli. In the middle of the century, it was decided to treat schizophrenia with hypoglycemia – a rather dangerous and ineffective method, which, nevertheless, was used for several decades in the absence of others. Quite traditional methods of cancer treatment are poisoning (chemotherapy) and radiation burn (radiotherapy).

Cancer treatment with oncolytic viruses is also not such a new idea, moreover, it is one of the most advanced and rapidly developing technologies.

Back in the late nineteenth century, doctors discovered that even quite severe cancer patients have an unexpected remission after an infection. In the fifties, it was just a fashionable idea: to infect patients with wild (natural, then they were not yet able to modify them) viruses, with difficult-to-predict results. And in our time, experiments are being conducted with genetically modified viruses. In 2015, talimogene laherparepvec was approved in the USA and the EU for the treatment of melanoma. This is a genetically modified herpes virus that attacks only cancer cells, because healthy ones do not have the protein it needs. It is applied to patients in the late stages and it quite successfully removes skin manifestations, however, after a year of research it turned out that it does not fight metastases and does not stimulate the immune response.

They tried to treat glioblastoma with a slightly processed adenovirus, a common cold. Dr. Juan Fuyeo and Candelaria Gomez-Manzano from the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas have created the Delta24 virus, which also affects only brain cancer cells.

"When a virus detects a cancer cell, it enters it and begins to copy itself. The malignant cell is filled with virus particles and explodes. With each explosion, the particles move further in waves and hit other cancer cells. And so it goes on until all of them explode," the website of the research center says. 

This technology is still in clinical trials, however, already in humans. Three people achieved complete remission in 2015. However, then their cancer returned a few years later. A few more had the tumor shrunk and became less aggressive, and they lived much longer than the life expectancy of patients with such a tumor. Some did not react to this therapy at all. 

There are other viral therapies for melanoma and other intractable cancers. The advantage of viral therapy is also that it has significantly fewer side effects than chemistry or radiation. 

But it's still an amazing story with Zika. There, the researchers hope, apparently, that it will not be necessary to "remake" the virus in order for it to attack the tumor, it will do it itself. Well, overcoming the blood-brain barrier is also important: scientists are looking for ways to facilitate the delivery of the virus (and any therapy) to the tumor, trying to come up with something so that it does not need to be injected directly into the skull, which is quite inconvenient. We will follow this story with all our attention.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  24.05.2017