Modified measles virus shows potential for treating childhood brain tumors
Whew, that headline caught my attention just now on the Nationwide Children’s Hospital site while searching for information on medulloblastoma, a form of brain cancer that tends to affect children.
After all the recent brouhaha in the UK over Andrew Wakefield being struck off for professional misconduct relating to his role in the MMR vaccination scandal, tensions may be raised at the idea of using a modified form of the measles virus to treat a childhood brain cancer.
According to the hospital’s press release:
Vaccine strains of measles virus have been used to kill tumor cells in a number of tumor types including one type of adult brain tumor. One vaccine strain of measles, the Edmonston strain, targets the cell surface receptor CD46 to gain entry into susceptible cells. “This preference most likely explains the efficacy of Edmonston strains in killing tumor cells, given the high level of expression of CD46 in multiple tumor types,” said Dr. Raffel. “It is also the reason we chose to explore a modified Edmonston’s strain of measles virus for use in medulloblastoma.”
You learn something new every day.
This news comes hot on the heels of some other research conducted in pediatric brain tumors at St Jude Hospital in Memphis, which reported that:
“Twelve percent of tumors in this study had extra copies of the gene PDGFRA. Researchers reported similar gene-expression patterns associated with high levels of PDGFRA were also found in childhood tumors without extra copies of the gene. Extra copies of PDGFRA were even more common in tumors from children who had received brain irradiation for treatment of earlier cancers.”
As someone who experienced a malignant childhood cancer myself, it’s always gratifying to see research ongoing in this area and improvement in 5-year survival rates.
One Response to “Modified measles virus shows potential for treating childhood brain tumors”
Interestingly, this is a really hot topic today as CBS and Katie Couric are running a story about photon beam therapy and pediatric brain cancer:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500803_162-20006073-500803.html
HT @erohealth for the link!
Comments are closed.