VIRUSES hitching a lift on the body鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檛 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 鈥渏ump off鈥� into the cancer cells. 鈥淥ne of the attractions is that the T-cells will find the tumour for you,鈥� 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.
