Thanks to ground-breaking stem cell research being done at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), there is hope that improved understanding and treatment for neuroblastoma could be on the way.
Neuroblastoma is an oft treatment resistant strain of cancer that attacks the sympathetic nervous system, which is the body's control center for vital organs and instinctive "fight or flight" type responses.
Although the disease is often responsive to chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, patients with the worst cases have only a 50% long-term survival rate.
The study, lead by CCHMC, was published online by Public Library of Science One on January 21. It aims to shed more light on how some cancers form and how to treat them.
“The main finding of our study is that pediatric neuroblastomas seem to have a population of cells with stem-cell characteristics that we may need to target for therapy,” says Timothy Cripe, MD, PhD, and senior investigator, physician and researcher in CCHMC's division of Hematology and Oncology.
Cripe continues, “we also show that one promising approach for targeted treatment is biological therapy, such as an engineered oncolytic virus that seeks out and kills progenitor cells that could be the seeds of cancers.”
This is where mice enter the picture.
Using a reprogrammed strain of the herpes virus, the researchers, lead by Dr. Cripe, have blocked tumors from forming in mice by targeting and killing the cells.
After growing human neuroblastoma cells in a lab culture, the researchers discovered that these cells share similar properties to neural stem cells, including the presence of the protein called nestin.
With this knowledge, the doctors injected a reprogrammed strain of an oncolytic herpes simplex virus known as rQNestin34.5, developed by cancer researchers at The Ohio State University, which locates protein and cancerous, or precancerous, cells containing nestin.
After hunting down them down, the reprogrammed herpes strain then imbeds itself in the nestin-filled cancerous cells and destroys the cancer by toxicity.
In the study, mice injected with neuroblastoma stem cells containing this mutated form of herpes were tumor free after 60 days, while mice injected with a less effective strain of herpes and saline developed tumors within 40 days and 30 days, respectively.
Although a great step forward for neuroblastoma research and treatment, Dr. Cripe cautions that much more research is still needed before deciding whether or not rQNestin34.5 would be effective on patients in a clinical setting.
Writer: Jonathan DeHart
Source: Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
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