Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 29, 2008|Volume 36, Number 20

This image shows the virus (in green)
attacking the tumor (in red).

Yale-engineered virus can attack brain tumors

A laboratory-engineered virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors has been developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers, it was reported Feb. 20 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.

Anthony van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery, says the current treatments — including chemotherapy, radiation and surgery — can prolong life for a few months, but generally fail because they don’t eliminate all of the cancer cells.

To test their tumor-targeting virus, van den Pol and his team transplanted tumor tissue from human or mouse brains into the brains of mice. They then inoculated the mice with a lab-created vesicular stomatitis virus, a replicating virus distantly related to the rabies virus.

“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol says. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”

The team also tested targeting brain tumors with the virus through the olfactory nerve and found it led to complete infection of the tumor. After infection, the tumor cells disappeared from the olfactory bulb, van den Pol says.

Co-authors include lead author Koray Özduman, Guido Wollmann and Joseph Piepmeier.

— By Jacqueline Weaver

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