A Glance at the State of Virotherapy as a Cancer Treatment

The future of cancer treatments is, one way or another, all about two things: (a) the ability to identify and target common mechanisms in a broad range of cancers so that one technology platform, one research initiative, can be useful for many patients rather than just a few, and (b) targeting cancer cells so that treatments are far more effective and have few and negligible side-effects. Today's cancer treatments are highly specific to cancer types and subtypes, the result of a large number of parallel lines of development undertaken at great cost, and are also damaging to the patient's healthy tissue. At the most blunt even the application of the best of chemotherapies are an art that involves finding the optimal point in the range lying between too little to degrade the cancer and too much for the patient to bear. Yet the transition is underway to a world in which cancer treatments are something you walk into a clinic to obtain, and walk right out again a hour later feeling no worse for the experience. There are many ways in which this goal might be achieved, coupling the knowledge needed to distinguish the chemistry of cancer cells from ordinary cells with any one of a number of possible delivery systems. Over the past decade researchers have demonstrated the use of nanoparticle assemblies that glue together sensors for cancer cell characteristics and cell-killing compounds, but why build new molecular machinery when there so much of the stuff is already evolved and wait...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs