The cure to cancer?
On October 27th 2015, the USA, along with Europe and Australia, approved the oncolytic virus Talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) to be used in clinics as recommended therapy for inoperable melanoma. Melanoma is a skin cancer which is the least prevalent of all the skin cancers, however has the most fatalities associated with its name. It was predicted that in 2017 approximately 90,000 people would develop melanoma and of those 90,000, 10,000 of them would die. This means that T-VEC has had the potential to save up to 10,000 people's lives in this year alone. From clinical trials conducted in the past, T-VEC was shown to completely eradicate the presence of melanoma from 32 patients out of 295, and on average people who were treated with T-VEC lived for around 23 months as opposed to the 19 months they were predicted with other treatments. Seeing as these are extremely early days for the clinical life of oncolytic virotherapy, these results are both impressive and significant.
Oncolytic viruses, A.K.A. OV's, are synthetically or naturally occurring viruses that specifically target and infect cancer cells. Given that cells are highly specific to their function, and we as humans show great nuance in the difference of our genetic code from person to person, there is no one virus that can cure every cancer known to man. This fact is apparent, as in the clinical trial for melanoma, not everybody was cured and if people with different types of cancer were brought in to participate, more likely than not, there would have been no positive effect on them. This is setting a precedent, the precedent is that we will have to actively search for, or manufacture, viruses that target a specific cancer, and then find a way of engineering that virus to work on the person to whom it is going to be administered. This will be an extremely tedious, yet highly rewarding, field of research for at the end of it we will have a clear means of dealing with malignant tumours in a way that works with the body as opposed to against, as we see with the blanket bomb methods used today (chemotherapy - radiotherapy).
Methods of producing OV's exist within a paradigm where the idea is to produce a virus that can only infect cancer cells (or heavily target them in any case) and therefore pose little threat to the host organism... us. For instance, scientists have developed strains of viruses which lack the gene that allows them to replicate within normal cells. Thus, they infect cancer cells and use the wide range of resources these cells provide (such as indefinite replication potential) which gives the virus a good holding ground within which to replicate and grow until they run out of space within the cancer cells. Eventually they break out of their nesting area, destroying the cancer cells in the process and then finding that they upon infecting healthy cells, they cannot replicate as they did, thus removing the cancer cells and the threat of widespread infection in one fell swoop. Going back to what I said previously about dealing with tumours with the body, I'm going to discuss an interesting relationship between oncolytic viruses and the immune system. A team of scientists in Switzerland developed an OV that infected the cancer cells of a malignant tumour, drawing the body's immune system to that area. In getting rid of the infection, the immune system was alerted to the presence of unauthorised cells (the tumour) and was stimulated into action and began attacking the tumour. What this shows, is that viruses can be used to trick the immune system into recognising its own glitch in its system, thus setting it up to eradicate it.
We need to put an emphasis on working with the body in situations where the body itself is corrupted; when we bombard the body with chemicals or radiation, we're destroying it further. By keeping the system of the organism as healthy as possible, we increase the chance of completely wiping out the problem, and we increase the chance of recovery afterwards. It's all well and good to say to a cancer patient that their lung cancer is gone after months of chemotherapy, but then you've left them vulnerable to infection and a whole plethora of other potential dangers. I see oncolytic virotherapy as a step in right direction for cancer treatment, and I hope that within our lifetime, we will physically hold the cure to cancers within our hands.
Thank you all very much for reading, this has been Timothy K. Bosse hoping you learnt something new and found it interesting, have a great day.
Citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084676/
https://jitc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40425-016-0158-5
https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm469571.htm
http://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-information/skin-cancer-facts
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/find-a-clinical-trial/trial-oncovex-gmcsf-melanoma-cannot-be-removed#undefined
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170526084538.htm
Oncolytic viruses, A.K.A. OV's, are synthetically or naturally occurring viruses that specifically target and infect cancer cells. Given that cells are highly specific to their function, and we as humans show great nuance in the difference of our genetic code from person to person, there is no one virus that can cure every cancer known to man. This fact is apparent, as in the clinical trial for melanoma, not everybody was cured and if people with different types of cancer were brought in to participate, more likely than not, there would have been no positive effect on them. This is setting a precedent, the precedent is that we will have to actively search for, or manufacture, viruses that target a specific cancer, and then find a way of engineering that virus to work on the person to whom it is going to be administered. This will be an extremely tedious, yet highly rewarding, field of research for at the end of it we will have a clear means of dealing with malignant tumours in a way that works with the body as opposed to against, as we see with the blanket bomb methods used today (chemotherapy - radiotherapy).
Methods of producing OV's exist within a paradigm where the idea is to produce a virus that can only infect cancer cells (or heavily target them in any case) and therefore pose little threat to the host organism... us. For instance, scientists have developed strains of viruses which lack the gene that allows them to replicate within normal cells. Thus, they infect cancer cells and use the wide range of resources these cells provide (such as indefinite replication potential) which gives the virus a good holding ground within which to replicate and grow until they run out of space within the cancer cells. Eventually they break out of their nesting area, destroying the cancer cells in the process and then finding that they upon infecting healthy cells, they cannot replicate as they did, thus removing the cancer cells and the threat of widespread infection in one fell swoop. Going back to what I said previously about dealing with tumours with the body, I'm going to discuss an interesting relationship between oncolytic viruses and the immune system. A team of scientists in Switzerland developed an OV that infected the cancer cells of a malignant tumour, drawing the body's immune system to that area. In getting rid of the infection, the immune system was alerted to the presence of unauthorised cells (the tumour) and was stimulated into action and began attacking the tumour. What this shows, is that viruses can be used to trick the immune system into recognising its own glitch in its system, thus setting it up to eradicate it.
We need to put an emphasis on working with the body in situations where the body itself is corrupted; when we bombard the body with chemicals or radiation, we're destroying it further. By keeping the system of the organism as healthy as possible, we increase the chance of completely wiping out the problem, and we increase the chance of recovery afterwards. It's all well and good to say to a cancer patient that their lung cancer is gone after months of chemotherapy, but then you've left them vulnerable to infection and a whole plethora of other potential dangers. I see oncolytic virotherapy as a step in right direction for cancer treatment, and I hope that within our lifetime, we will physically hold the cure to cancers within our hands.
Thank you all very much for reading, this has been Timothy K. Bosse hoping you learnt something new and found it interesting, have a great day.
Citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084676/
https://jitc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40425-016-0158-5
https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm469571.htm
http://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-information/skin-cancer-facts
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/find-a-clinical-trial/trial-oncovex-gmcsf-melanoma-cannot-be-removed#undefined
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170526084538.htm
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