Matthias Gromeier, M.D., assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, said “we made a drug out of a virus by engineering its destructive abilities from a foe into a friend”. The key to Gromeier’s success has been disabling the poliovirus’ ability to kill normal brain cells while retaining its ability to kill cancer cells in the brain. To do so, Gromeier’s team swapped a critical genetic element from the common cold “rhinovirus” with the corresponding genetic element from the poliovirus. The genetic element, called an “IRES” (internal ribosomal entry site), enables a virus to express its own genetic information inside the host cell it has invaded, said Gromeier.
3 thoughts on “Researchers Use Crippled Poliovirus To Attack Brain Cancer”
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Giulio, I just wanted to say I appreciate the input you have been providing to SciScoop over the past week or so and hope you keep it up. I think we can certainly use some more contriubtors to balance my crazy postings, and your unique Italian / Spanish viewpoint could certainly provide a different slant on things. Welcome to our small but growing circle!
This is going to seem silly, but I’ve exposed so much of my inner workings by now that a little more isn’t going to matter much. In addition to sitting in the dark latenights and watching morose Japanese anime like Cowboy Beebop, there was a period for a year or so where I’d wake up to the cheerful children’s TV stories of Hammy Hamster and his good friend GP the guinea pig….
My wife is a labor-and-delivery nurse who works 12 hour shifts and we wake up at the ungodly hour of 5 AM (even more ungodly if you’ve been channel-surfing at 3AM as a frequent insomniac like me – thank God I’ve got the Tivo now, TV is a wasteland at that hour – but as usual I digress) and she immediately turns on the TV for some sound to wake her up, a half hour process for her that takes me ten seconds. Anyway, she’s a cheerful chipmunk, so to speak, and for a long time her preferred wakeup program was the 5AM live-action children’s adventures of Once Upon A Hamster. (They expected KIDS to be up at this ungodly hour watching HAMSTERS!?!)
Silly as it sounds, I became a real fan of this Canadian talking-animals TV show. It is, in one word, sweet. And how could a guy like me not fall in love with the eccentric, unintentionally insightful, daffy inventor known as GP who every other episode is inventing some whatchamacallit or thingamabob gizmo to solve problems the animals of Riverbank never even knew they had? If you ever get a chance to check out Hammy Hamster and GP, dear reader, don’t hesitate a moment.
Thanks Ricky – I am a long time fan of Slashdot and even more Kuro5hin, but at times I find their choice of articles not very interesting. So I like SciScoop as it is based on Scoop and is dedicated to discussing more interesting things. I will certainly do my best to contribute and I hope we can achieve the popularity pf /.