Good News in the War on Cancer

I've been following this for years, and finally the notion that viral therapy might actually work seems to be proving out:

A common virus that is harmless to people can destroy cancerous cells in the body and might be developed into a new cancer therapy, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

The virus, called adeno-associated virus type 2, or AAV-2, infects an estimated 80 percent of the population.

"Our results suggest that adeno-associated virus type 2, which infects the majority of the population but has no known ill effects, kills multiple types of cancer cells yet has no effect on healthy cells," said Craig Meyers, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.

"We believe that AAV-2 recognizes that the cancer cells are abnormal and destroys them. This suggests that AAV-2 has great potential to be developed as an anti-cancer agent," Meyers said in a statement.

He said at a meeting of the American Society for Virology that studies have shown women infected with AAV-2 who are also infected with a cancer-causing wart virus called HPV develop cervical cancer less frequently than uninfected women do.

AAV-2 is a small virus that cannot replicate itself without the help of another virus. But with the help of a second virus it kills cells.

For their study, Meyers and colleagues first infected a batch of human cells with HPV, some strains of which cause cervical cancer.

They then infected these cells and normal cells with AAV-2.

After six days, all the HPV-infected cells died.

The same thing happened with cervical, breast, prostate and squamous cell tumor cells.

There's a long, long way to go in making this an effective therapy and validating that there truly are no unduly troublesome side effects, but it is certainly a promising avenue.