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Designer virus attacks cancer cells
Canadian doctor's promising research 80% effective in mice
 
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
CREDIT: CanWest News Service, Ottawa Citizen
 
Drs. John Bell, left, and David Stojdl have furthered research into cancer fighting viruses.
 
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OTTAWA - An Ottawa cancer researcher has engineered a virus able to kill many types of cancer cells while leaving normal cells healthy. He hopes to begin trials in human patients in just over a year.

Tests in live mice have been so successful that in some 80 per cent of cases the virus killed all the human cancer cells carried by the mice.

Dr. John Bell, of the Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre, has been working on the designer virus for years. In 2000, he engineered an early version of the same virus -- one so successful that most cancer cells were "completely blown away."

But there was a catch: It only worked in combination with a hormone treatment. The latest version works by itself.

While the history of cancer research has seen many treatments that work in mice but not in humans, Bell's new virus has been so outstanding that he's hopeful it will have a bright future.

As well, he has been testing human cancer cells injected into mice. While these are nourished by the animals' blood, they keep their human DNA and are still human cells, a more valuable research tool than ordinary mouse tumours.

The medical research journal Cancer Cell has made the findings the cover story of today's edition. A separate review of Bell's work calls it "a breakthrough" and "a promising new therapeutic oncolytic (cancer-killing) viral candidate."

The anti-cancer weapon is a genetically engineered version of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), an animal virus that in Canada mainly causes minor infections in cattle. "We've been engineering it to make it so that it kills tumour cells more specifically," Bell said.

"In some of the ways we administered it, 100 per cent of the animals were cured. So it's pretty effective," he said.

"In the paper we analysed 60 different samples from cancer patients -- and about 80 per cent of the samples we looked at were killed. So it's a broad spectrum of cancers."

He believes cancer cells have a structural weakness normal cells do not. Identifying this flaw was the crucial first step toward finding a virus that would infect them.

Once inside the cancer cell, the virus starts to make thousands of copies of itself.

"So it's like a little parasite. It takes over all the machinery inside the cell and turns it to its own use. So it basically turns the cell into a bag, a virus-producing cell. The result of that is you make lots of viruses and the cell just dies."

The genetic machinery of a normal cell will not allow the virus to take over that cell's working parts. In fact, its exposure to the virus even stimulates the body's immune defences against the virus.

Clinical trials on the original virus were supposed to be under way already, but the American pharmaceutical firm that worked with Bell had financial problems. The goal now is to begin the first round of human tests late in 2004.

Ottawa Citizen

© Copyright 2003 Edmonton Journal
 
 

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