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Mayo Clinic Researchers Develop "Cancer Snitch"

Date:
May 8, 2002
Source:
Mayo Clinic
Summary:
If the treatment of cancer is a war -- as declared decades ago -- one of the most daunting problems has always been how to develop reliable reconnaissance once behind enemy lines -- that is, inside the tumor. Not any more. Mayo Clinic molecular medicine researchers have developed a “cancer snitch.” The snitch is a new elite-force technology: a genetically engineered, trackable virus that can keep doctors informed about the progress of their offensives once they’ve penetrated a tumor.
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ROCHESTER, Minn. -- If the treatment of cancer is a war -- as declared decades ago -- one of the most daunting problems has always been how to develop reliable reconnaissance once behind enemy lines -- that is, inside the tumor.

Not any more. Mayo Clinic molecular medicine researchers have developed a “cancer snitch.” The snitch is a new elite-force technology: a genetically engineered, trackable virus that can keep doctors informed about the progress of their offensives once they’ve penetrated a tumor. The snitch may become a new weapon in the strategic assault on cancer.

Kah-Whye Peng, Ph.D., and Stephen J. Russell, M.D., Ph.D., both Mayo Clinic molecular medicine researchers, have reported encouraging results about their experiment on mice to find an inexpensive and painless way to get inside information from a cancer tumor under attack by virotherapy. Their results are published in the current issue of Nature Medicine.

Drs. Peng and Russell built their recent study on their previous work in virotherapy, which discovered that a modified measles vaccine virus can be a strong and specific killer of cancer cells.

“Basically, the driver for this research is our keen interest in developing a new approach to cancer treatment using viruses that replicate inside the cancer,” Dr. Russell says. “It’s a captivating concept, but there’s a huge problem. Viruses are sort of wild. After you give a virus, it’s going to spread -- that’s what viruses do -- and there is anxiety with virus therapy about how it will work in different people -- is it getting to the cancer cells; how is it spreading; how fast is it eliminated? And until now, we’ve had no way of answering these questions.”

What were missing, Dr. Russell says, were the basic pharmocokinetics and pharmocodynamics studies. Pharmocokinetics and pharmocodynamics refer to analytical processes in the development of all prescription medicines that reveal many aspects of how a drug affects the body -- not just its therapeutic effects.

According to Dr. Peng, “The most important thing about our work is that now we will help clinicians judge and gauge treatment because we are getting feedback from the patient’s body itself about what the (therapeutic) virus is doing.”

In this latest study, Drs. Peng and Russell took their earlier work with the measles virus a step further by engineering the virus to leak information back to the outside through means of the “snitch.” They did this by engineering into the measles virus the snitch, which is the ability to secrete either one of two markers. One marker is a hormone produced in human pregnancy; the other is a protein found in developing embryos, and later in life, in some cancers. Both these substances are already used as reliable biological indicators.

The result is that the Mayo Clinic’s new trackable virus works to report confidential information from within the body back outside the body to give scientists information that allows them to track biological activity. In the case of the cancer snitch, the activity in question is knowing how effective the


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Materials provided by Mayo Clinic. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Cite This Page:

Mayo Clinic. "Mayo Clinic Researchers Develop "Cancer Snitch"." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 May 2002. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020508072339.htm>.
Mayo Clinic. (2002, May 8). Mayo Clinic Researchers Develop "Cancer Snitch". ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 28, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020508072339.htm
Mayo Clinic. "Mayo Clinic Researchers Develop "Cancer Snitch"." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020508072339.htm (accessed March 28, 2024).

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