Cancer The use of viruses to fight cancer

Authors Avatar

The use of viruses to fight cancer

Cancer occurs when the mechanisms that control cell reputation get damaged. This could happen due to four main genes being damaged:

  • Oncogenes that instruct the cell to divide and so if these are damaged then the cell keeps dividing;
  • Tumour suppressor genes, these do the opposite and stop the cells from dividing but if these are damaged then the genes will never stop dividing;
  • Suicide genes, these cause the cell to break itself down if something goes wrong, this process is called apoptosis, but without this function, if the cell was to become damaged it would replicate in its damaged form could eventually cause cancer;
  • DNA-Repair genes, which are parts of the DNA that code of proteins that repair the DNA as it is constantly under attack, but if this gene is damaged then the repair proteins can no longer be made and that DNA can degrade.

(www.cancerresearchuk.org)

The damage to the DNA as stated above can be caused by exposure to x-rays, UV-light, cigarette smoke, an unhealthy diet and even some viruses as well as many other things. So it is extremely difficult to prevent cancer from occurring in the first place. Instead we have to be able to kill the cancer after it has invaded the body.  There are many techniques available to do this and they are constantly getting better, examples of a few are radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery. (Biological Science review, volume 5, number 1, September 2002) But this still isn’t good enough when, according to a article by the BBC published in 2003, only 50.8% of women and only 37.1% of men were still alive 5 years after being diagnosed. ()

Join now!

This means that new ways of fighting cancer are desperately needed and one such way is the use of viruses or virotheropy. Viruses can be harnessed in many ways that make them unique cancer fighting mechanism. This isn’t a new idea; ‘In 1912 an Italian gynaecology journal reported the case of a woman with advanced cervical cancer who, after being bitten by a dog, was vaccinated with a live but weakened strain of the rabies virus. To the doctors surprise, her tumour shrank.’ But due to a lack of understanding of DNA and how viruses worked it wasn’t till ...

This is a preview of the whole essay