RE:Gene therapy for human glioblastoma Let's talk about digitel's latest post, "Gene Therapy for Human Glioblastoma Using Neurotropic JC Virus."
You can find the whole text of the paper
here.
Gene therapy for the treatment of tumours is interesting. There has been lots of work going on for a long time. This particular area of study may have legs. Basically, a "suicide" gene in the tumour is turned on, causing the tumour cells to die. But, as with many other similar efforts, the method is somewhat invasive with direct injection of the gene therapy into the glioblastoma brain tumour. The process would seem to be far more complicated and expensive than an xB3-XYZ injection. An xB3-based therapy could distribute a therapy throughout the CNS that could treat all tumours, even diffuse small tumours that have only a few cells that couldn't be detected and, therefore, couldn't receive injections. It should be noted, however, that most glioblastoma patients have only one tumour. Still, a therapy like xB3-XYZ that is broadly distributed would have a fighting chance of dealing with these tumours, and should be simpler and less expensive to administer. (Gene therapies have horrific upfront costs.)
Also, digitel recently
posted a piece about another gene therapy that causes brain cells to produce trastuzumab. The gene therapy is delivered with a viral vector that is injected into the cerebral spinal fluid. The paper is entitled, "Intrathecal Viral Vector Delivery of Trastuzumab" and I got my hands on a copy of it.
I usually stop reading when the word "intrathecal" is mentioned, but this one was interesting. With this therapy, some brain cells are altered genetically to produce trastuzumab. The brain actually produces its own trastuzumab - forever! Breast cancer metastases, wherever they're found, can become resistant to trastuzumab with successive courses of chemotherapy. Some patients develop cardiac problems with prolonged or successive rounds of trastuzumab therapy. Although ways may be found to turn off this trastuzumab production, it just doesn't have the apparent safety, simplicity, practicality and lower cost that xB3-001 should have.
There are lots of ideas and efforts out there to treat brain tumours but, so far, we gotta like where xB3-001 seems to be heading.
jdstox