Cancer-busting virus improves survival and reduces brain injury in aggressive brain tumourRSS Feed
A strain of measles virus specially engineered to destroy cancer cells significantly improves survival in a virulent form of brain cancer, the science news source EurekAlert.org reports.
Disseminated medulloblastoma is an especially aggressive form of brain tumour that spreads rapidly into the cerebrospinal fluid. It mainly affects children and takes this life-threatening "disseminated" form in around 20% of newly diagnosed cases and in 75 of patients who have had the non-disseminated form previously. As the tumour grows, it crushes and destroys neighbouring brain tissue, causing progressive brain injury, and cancer cells in the cerebrospinal fluid spread the disease rapidly.
However, the treatment itself is also exceedingly dangerous, involving multi-drug chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy - interventions that can themselves result in brain injury and hazardous toxicity.
The new oncolytic (literally, cancer-splitting) virus, MV-GFP, was administered into the brains of laboratory animals three or 14 days after they had been injected with two different human medulloblastoma cell lines. The animals received a total of five doses of MV-GFP. Animals with the first cancer cell line who had also received the oncolytic virus outlived those who had not by 45 days (the latter group on average lived only 27 days). The second cell line was more virulent than the first, but treated animals lived for 37 days while untreated animals died after 16 days.
Lead author Dr Cory Raffel, Professor and Vice-Chair of Neurological Surgery at Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Centre, said: "[A]ny treatment that can effectively treat this condition while avoiding radiation therapy could potentially improve survival in these patients and quality of life for survivors."
A phase I clinical trial for humans is planned.
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