We kill cancer with some pretty bad shit now: harsh beams of radiation, brutal chemicals, cutting it out of the body with knives. There’s one therapy that totally removes a patient’s immune system, re-engineers it in a lab, and puts it back in. And there’s one new avenue of bad killing bad that kinda seems so obvious that it’s remarkable that it’s just now coming to light: killing cancer with another disease.New research from the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Copenhagen focuses on the vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, a virus most commonly seen in livestock that’s a lot like foot-and-mouth disease. It’s extremely rare for it to infect humans and, when it does, it shows up as a mild flu-like illness. Not being cows, pigs, or horses, it shouldn’t concern us very much. Except, perhaps, if we happened to have one of a number of very common cancers.VSV not only kills cancer cells, but it blocks certain molecules that cancer cells release to suppress the body’s immune system. Cancers don’t just grow in the body; they actively fight back against the body. So far, this has only been attempted in a lab with isolated human cancer cells, not in a full-on human. Clinical trials are underway in the U.S. as you read this.The potential is not so much blindly injecting VSV into cancer patients so much as it is the potential to use mutated virus cells as super-specific attack weapons against particular cancer types. While, at the same time, giving the immune system a boast. Eureka, most definitely. Fuck you cancer.
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Connections:
- “The Next Wave Of Cancer Treatment: Particle Accelerators ":http://motherboard.tv/2010/9/29/the-next-wave-of-cancer-treatment-particle-accelerators—2
- Researchers Give Cancer a Run for its Money with New Immune System Cells
