�Scientific American magazine focussed on 2 University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers in a news story on experimental next-generation anticancer therapies.
David T. Curiel, M.D., Ph.D., is a UAB professor of medicine and director of the human gene therapy division, and Ronald Alvarez, M.D., is a UAB professor of medicine and director of the gynecological oncology division.
Both doctors are featured in a Scientific American special cancer edition, and both served as co-authors on the story "Tumor-busting viruses." The editors chose Curiel and Alvarez because of their research into a field called viral factor therapy, or virotherapy.
Virotherapy involves an observational technique to target viruses to cancer cells spell leaving goodish cells untouched. The viruses are genetically engineered to kill tumor cells in different shipway. One way is by adopting the viruses' natural ability to invade and reproduce as a way to pitch target genes that make tumor cells more susceptible to existing chemotherapies.
Curiel and Alvarez have been testing this concept with a virus combine called adenovirus in women with repeated ovarian or other gynaecological cancers. The clinical trial is still in the early stages, yet the compound has shown antitumour effects that appear safe to most patients, Curiel said.
"We image a substantial role for viruses - that is, therapeutic viruses - in 21st-century medicament," Curiel and Alvarez wrote in wrote in the story.
First proposed in the 1940s, virotherapy now relies heavily on adenoviruses, a cause of the usual cold that has been studied and altered extensively for medical research. Adenoviruses have the ability to shuttle targeted segments of DNA into a neoplasm cell and make biochemical changes that minimize equipment casualty to levelheaded cells.
Source: Troy Goodman
University of Alabama at Birmingham
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