HOUSTON, April 21 (UPI) -- Researchers said Friday they have made a hybrid virus -- drawing from animals and bacteria -- that can deliver genes to mouse tumors.
The research team -- at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center -- said the new hybrid is potentially an important step on the road to making human cancer "more visible and accessible to treatment" and might eventually lead to a way to more accurately diagnose, monitor and treat human tumors.
"In tumor-bearing mice, we show that this hybrid virus can target tumors systemically to deliver an imaging or therapeutic gene," says the study co-author Renata Pasqualini, a professor of medicine and cancer biology at UT. "The signal is specific only to tumors, so one can monitor drug effectiveness at the molecular level," she said.
The research team created the hybrid virus by combining genetic elements and biological attributes of an animal virus and a bacterial virus.
The study showed how particles from the virus combination are able to deliver genes to experimental tumors in mice, as well as to the blood vessels feeding the tumors. This way, the tumors can be genetically marked for imaging with a body scanner, the researchers said.
"This is only a proof-of-concept, and although we have yet to translate these hybrid viruses for use in humans, we hope that this new system will have future clinical applications," says Wadih Arap, co-author of the study and also a professor of medicine and cancer biology at UT.
