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viral targeting of tumour cells
Tseng and colleagues showed that Sindbis virus could infect tumours without infecting surrounding normal tissue and cause significant reduction in tumour mass (up to complete regression in some models) whether they induced the tumours subcutaneously or in the The virus was injected intraperitoneally or intravenously at as great a remove from the tumor sites as possible, which means that the virus targeted the tumours after being disseminated in the blood. This is great news, because it indicates that we can build a tumour-seeking virus missile that will find metastatic tumours no pathologist or surgeon could detect. It's also important to note that Sindbis is not a retrovirus (and so does not integrate its genome into the host cell's) and is highly lethal, so it kills virtually any cell it enters well before that cell could become a Sindbis-induced cancer itself. The virus used in this study was created in such a way that it cannot package itself into new particles after infecting a cell: it is replication incompetent, and cannot spread on its own through the patient's body. (Barring frankenviral recombination events, it only gives you a cold anyway.) The images are from a different paper entirely (Zhang et al. J Virol vol. 76 pp. 11645-11658). Right, cryoelectron microscopy map of a partially deglycosylated Sindbis particle; left, surface topology model of same. Both pictures are to the same scale, the bar in the map represents 20 nm. Comments Post a comment |
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TOGAvirus?
xoxoxScientists are weird.xoxox