A Cure for Cancer?

You would likely do almost anything to cure your child if your child was diagnosed with cancer.  With a grim prognosis, you might travel to a foreign country where unorthodox treatments are used.  You would entertain any form of experimental treatment if nothing else worked; but what if your doctor advocated injecting your child with a massive dose of the HIV virus or an injection of the measles virus as a cure?  What then?

These viruses are known killers.

All viruses walk a fine line between being a living and non-living thing.  Viruses cannot reproduce themselves...and yet, that is their sole function.  Viruses are, essentially, weird little zombies that contain a single genetic code for reproduction.  Set adrift, a virus will do nothing until it happens onto a proper living host cell.  Once a virus finds a living cell to its liking (they tend to be very finicky), a virus will attach to or invade the cell and take it hostage.  As soon as possible, the virus will inject its specific genetic instructions into the cell.  The infected cell now alters all internal machinery to do one thing: make more copies of the virus that infected it.  Eventually, the cell filled with the viruses it reproduced will burst and spew out more viruses to go forth and seek more living cells so they can reproduce.

Oncologists are now commissioning some of the more insidious viruses to kill cancer.  Not “treat.”  Kill.  I am far too simple to navigate the thorny patch of details of exactly how, but cancer researchers are commanding such monsters as the measles virus and the HIV virus in battles against cancer.

Using an “it takes a thief to catch a thief” theme, researchers genetically “gut out” the deadly viruses and retool them so the viruses are attracted to and kill only specific tumor cells in the human body.  Mass doses of the altered viruses are injected into cancer patients.  The cancer patients rapidly fall into an extreme fever as the viruses go to battle with cancer cells.  Some children battling leukemia have lapsed into a coma for a few days as the cancer cells and viruses engage.

The success in treating children with leukemia has been remarkable.  Once the children break through the fever, they quickly recover.  The cancer is often completely eradicated in a matter of only a few weeks.  Nothing of the cancer remains.  Nothing.

At a minimum, such genetic tinkering scares the hell out of me, but I cannot help but cheer this:  A possible cure for cancer!

I had neither read nor seen anything about using viruses to fight cancer until I watched an exposé about this on VICE, the HBO investigative series.  Some doctors predict the use of viruses in treating cancer may be fairly widespread by 2016.   Honestly, I shed a few tears as I watched once doomed little kids walking away cancer-free.

 

I thought of my wife—nearly four years gone.

--Mitchell Hegman