[extropy-chat] Scientists Create 'Obedient Virus'

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

An international team of Mayo Clinic-led researchers is first to devise a
system that consistently converts the measles virus into a therapeutic
killer that hunts down and destroys cancer cells -- and cancer cells only.
Their research findings appear as an advanced electronic article of Nature
Biotechnology. The researchers harnessed the viral trait for attacking and
commandeering cells, and then redirected the virus to attack diseased,
rather than healthy cells. The work was done on laboratory animals
implanted with two kinds of human cancer cells -- ovarian cancer and
lymphoma -- and is probably still years away from use as a human therapy.
But the concept has at last been proved in mice with human cancer tumors
-- and that's an essential step toward using this approach to expand and
improve human treatments for a variety of cancers.
"When I saw the data, I was completely stunned. It's the sort of thing
that, having worked on targeting viruses for about 15 years, I just
couldn't believe that we'd finally got what we'd been hunting all that
time," says Stephen Russell, M.D., Ph.D., lead researcher and director of
Mayo Clinic's Molecular Medicine Program.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/6973