GMO Newcastle Disease Virus vs Prostate Cancer ? erv

Another day, another disease treatment strategy based off a genetically modified virus!

Prostate Specific Antigen Retargeted Recombinant Newcastle Disease Virus for Prostate Cancer Virotherapy.

This one is so clever, you guys. It is so freaking clever!

Some of you might know that sometimes, when prostate cancer is present, there is an elevated level of ?Prostate Specific Antigen?. Physicians used to test for elevated PSA levels as a test for prostate cancer, but because it lead to over-diagnosis/unnecessary treatments, its not anymore.

But lets say you *know* prostate cancer is there, and it is causing difficulties.? PSA is usually there, over expressed.

Well ?PSA? isnt a marker put in our genome by The Creator to be a marker for prostate cancer. It has a normal cellular function? PSA is an enzyme. Its function is to cut stuff.

Newcastle Disease Virus? the protein it uses to infect cells needs to be cut before it can initiate infection.

So they made the virus need PSA. They genetically modified the virus to need PSA to cut its fusion protein to infect cells.

A cancer killing virus that can only infect cells that have lots of PSA on the surface, or when there is a lot of PSA floating around? prostate cancer cell lines that over-express PSA, and hopefully, prostate tumors that over-express PSA in patients.

I have to say ?hopefully? because it has not been tried in humans yet, and a previous generation of NDV against prostate cancer did work in mice (but they havent tried this one yet).? It might not work at all, but I wanted to highlight the extremely clever ideas coming out of these GMO virus labs. Incredible!

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2013/03/01/gmo-newcastle-disease-virus-vs-prostate-cancer/

lionel richie kenny rogers avatar the last airbender david wright cory booker cubs cj wilson