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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dr. Lowe, from In the Pipeline, writes about a recent study using Zika as an oncolytic virus to kill brain cancer cells:

Oncology drives you to some pretty strange ideas about therapy. But that’s understandable – in what other field are you trying aggressively to kill off parts of the patient’s own body? That’s why chemotherapy started off with the study of people who had been exposed to mustard gas (during the Bari bombing raid), where it was noticed that systemic exposure to such brutally reactive compounds killed off fast-dividing cells before (just before) they killed off the rest.

[...] So, you’re looking for something that can reach in and kill off brain cells – not all of them, of course, just some of them – so what might you have seen recently that seems to go in and attack certain brain cell populations? Got it – how about Zika virus?

[...] The terrible effects of Zika infection on a developing fetus are due to its effects on neuronal precursor cells, and it appears that the virus can attack the stem-cell-like population that’s such a problem with glioblastoma. One reason that this isn’t quite as crazy as it might sound is that glioblastoma tends to stay put – it’s very rarely metastatic, and after surgery (when that’s possible) it tends to recur in situ, from residual cells that can’t all be removed. So you don’t need to infect a patient’s whole body – just a localized shot of (attenuated) virus might do the trick.

[...] The paper tries several patient-derived cell glioblastoma cell cultures and several strains of Zika virus, and it does seem to infect them readily, as opposed to differentiated glial cells, which are almost untouched. Experiments on tissue removed during glioblastoma surgical procedures (and control brain tissue removed during epilepsy surgery) confirmed these results. Related flaviviruses (like West Nile) don’t show this kind of selectivity. The authors went as far as mouse glioma models (and a mouse-adapted form of Zika) and demonstrated growth inhibition of the tumors, although this is arguably getting a bit far afield as compared to the results in human tissue.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/09/06/repurposing-zika
http://jem.rupress.org/content/early/2017/09/05/jem.20171093
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus

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