[ad_1]
Dr. Kenneth Alexander was coming home one day last year when he thought about the idea: what if the Zika virus could be used to kill an infant cancer called neuroblastoma?
The Zika epidemic was in its third year and scientists had learned that the virus damages the nervous systems of unborn babies by destroying developing nerve cells.
Nerve cells in development also develop neuroblastomas.
Thus, Alexander, head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children's Hospital of Nemours, began to think. Dr. Griffith Parks, a scientist at the University of Central Florida who is studying Zika, called in a fellow surgeon
. After almost a year of research, the team released preliminary results from their first study, showing that neuroblastoma cells that were exposed to the Zika virus in the laboratory died 10 days after being infected, making virus a potential treatment for cancer.
The team The results published in PLOS One.
"It's like all good ideas.It's early and there may be a fly in ointment," said Alexander in an interview Wednesday. "But at this point, things look promising, the way forward is here and we hope to attract a lot of other people interested in this research."
Neuroblastoma is cancer of the nerve cells that reside at the 39, outside the brain. It is the second most common type of childhood cancer and its mortality rate is disproportionately high compared to other childhood cancers. It mainly affects infants and children under 5 years old.
Treatment usually involves surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy, or an badociation in high-risk cases. In some cases, none of the treatments work.
"There is a lot of research on neuroblastoma, but we wanted to take a different approach [to finding a treatment]," said Dr. Tamarah Westmoreland, co-author of the study, General Pediatric and Thoracic. surgeon in Nemours. "I think Zika is very promising.When looking at these results, we think that it can be used [along with] current therapies.However, we are very early in this research."
The team Orlando is not the first to examine Zika's potential to kill cancer.
Several groups, including one in the United States and one in Brazil, have preliminary studies showing that infection with Zika kills glioblastoma cells in the adult brain, potentially opening new doors to treat this type aggressive and common brain cancer.
Another Brazilian group reported in June that a strain of Zika virus was killing aggressive cancer tumors.
Alexander said that what is unique about finding his team is the identification of a surface protein called CD24.
Protein makes cancer cells susceptible to being killed by Zika virus. the CD24 protein did not respond to Zika, the Alexander team found in their research laboratory.
"So with these results, we can ask what other cancers express CD24," Alexander said. "Now we start looking at other cancer cells that express CD24 to see if we can kill them too."
Scientists do not know completely how the virus enters and destroys cells. There may be proteins in addition to CD24 that make a cell sensitive to Zika.
"But at least we had a part of history," Alexander said.
This is not the first time that a virus has been used to treat cancer, whose history dates back to the 1940s. More recently, a modified form of the Herpes has been used to treat melanoma.
Alexander stated that, according to the preliminary results of his team, the Zika virus should not be changed from its natural form. are immune to the virus.
"We have this fortuitous situation, where the virus can make a subgroup of people really sick, but for the majority of us, it is a mild infection," he said.
Most children and adults infected with the virus do not develop symptoms or have a mild cold-like reaction.
Alexander said the potential therapy could be an injection, much like how mosquitoes infect humans. Or an injection at the site of a tumor excised to prevent the return of cancer.
The team is now conducting research on petri dishes and rodents.
Alexander and Parks, badociate badociate dean of research and director of the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, also plan to study how CD24 interacts with the Zika virus.
Parks postponed an interview request to Alexander
[email protected], 407-420-5158, @naseemmiller
Subscribe to Health Information Bulletins
More headlines … »
[ad_2]
Source link
