Mayo Clinic researchers working with colleagues in Germany have devised a much-needed multilevel safety feature for viruses used to treat cancer. In the process of making cancer-killing viruses more specific to cancer tumor cells, they report having improved the therapeutic effectiveness of viruses. They did this by engineering a modified measles virus that turns on only in the presence of secretions specific to malignant cancer cells.In effect, the Mayo Clinic virus makeover uses proteins secreted by cancer cells as the unique key to the virus’ ignition. Their report on the topic appears in the Aug. 1 edition of Cancer Research.
