Virus artificially evolved to selectively attack only cancer cells

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-technique-virus-cancer-treatment.html

The virus so evolved can be designed to either kill cancer cells directly or indirectly by acting as drug delivery vehicles that selectively inject only the cancer cells with a lethal dose of cancer drug -either way, non-cancer cells shouldn't be harmed thus there shouldn't be too much side effects.
I think this approach is very promising!

Originally posted by humy
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-technique-virus-cancer-treatment.html

The virus so evolved can be designed to either kill cancer cells directly or indirectly by acting as drug delivery vehicles that selectively inject only the cancer cells with a lethal dose of cancer drug -either way, non-cancer cells shouldn't be harmed thus there shouldn't be too much side effects.
I think this approach is very promising!

That is really interesting. The part about it not replicating well sounds like it will end up being a thousand dollar a day treatment. Which could be cheap considering the alternatives.

As a survivor of two different cancers, I can only hope it gets into the mainstream very quickly. There are so many types of cancer treatment that simply can't be given at effective dosage levels now.

Originally posted by Kewpie
As a survivor of two different cancers, I can only hope it gets into the mainstream very quickly. There are so many types of cancer treatment that simply can't be given at effective dosage levels now.

Yes indeed. I have been very lucky so far, no health problems at all, not bad for a 72 year old I think. I am one of the few in my family so blessed. My sister and wife and daughter have major medical problems.

I thought female life expectancy meant that the average female was healthier than the average male, but since I've reached the age of wisdom I've discovered it's not the case at all. It's just that we females get stuff that's debilitating and misery making but not immediately fatal. 🙁

Originally posted by Kewpie
I thought female life expectancy meant that the average female was healthier than the average male, but since I've reached the age of wisdom I've discovered it's not the case at all. It's just that we females get stuff that's debilitating and misery making but not immediately fatal. 🙁

I think in a few decades most of that will be gone. Of course we probably won't live to see it but I think medical advances will fix a lot of male and female medical problems. Like my wife, she has asthma really bad and a lot of other issues and a lot of those are auto-immune problems. I see that getting fixed in 20 years. Whether it will help her in time is problematic though.

here is another bit of promising sounding research in cancer treatment:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-biologists-id-cancer-weakness.html

it uses a combination of two drugs that are effective against chemotherapy-resistant cancer despite each of these drugs being ineffective on their own and one can even be counterproductive if used on its own!

here is yet another bit of promising sounding research in cancer treatment:

http://phys.org/news/2013-11-nanotech-two-step-method-potential-pancreatic.html

This time it is only (as far as I am aware ) for pancreatic cancer which is a cancer that is normally a death sentence for most patients. But it has a curious analogy with the cancer treatment of combination of two drugs (that I referenced in my last post ) each of which don't work well on their own but are only effective when combined because this time the treatment consists of injecting two different kinds of nanoparticles neither of which has much effect on its own but should be effective when combined.

Perhaps these two latest proposed cancer treatments are marking a new age of much more intelligent and thought-out and complex cancer treatments that will be much more effective as a result?

Originally posted by humy
here is yet another bit of promising sounding research in cancer treatment:

http://phys.org/news/2013-11-nanotech-two-step-method-potential-pancreatic.html

This time it is only (as far as I am aware ) for pancreatic cancer which is a cancer that is normally a death sentence for most patients. But it has a curious analogy with the cancer treatment ...[text shortened]... gent and thought-out and complex cancer treatments that will be much more effective as a result?

Anything is more effective when it is thought out and well planned instead of done by random chance.

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
Anything is more effective when it is thought out and well planned instead of done by random chance.

The Instructor

Why WHAT could you be talking about here? Talking in riddles again.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-technique-drugs-illnesses.html
“...
An international team of researchers led by the University of Leicester has "harnessed the power of evolution" to create a new drug for possible use against heart disease, inflammation and other illnesses.
…
…
..."This involves making a particular cell type generate millions of different variants of our protein, selecting the variants that have improved properties and then repeating the cycle until the protein has been changed to a form with the exact properties we want."
To show how the method works, the group took a protein normally found in the body and evolved it into a form that can block a molecule involved in blood vessel growth and inflammation.
This new protein, called a ligand-trap, is now being developed as a potential therapeutic for treating heart disease, inflammation and other illnesses.
…
...”

I can't help wonder if the power of evolution could be somehow used to enhance the new cancer treatments I referenced in the last two posts? -for that to work, whether for the combination of two drugs I mentioned in the first post or the virus I referenced in the second post, you would have to somehow efficiently create many variations of each (perhaps genetically engineering cells to secrete millions of different variations of each one just like described in the above link? -but that would be a lot harder to achieve in this case because the variants aren't simple proteins that cells can so readily create but are either drug molecules or, worse, complex virus molecules! ) and then have a way to simultaneously and efficiently test all of them (I guess finding a way to do this truly efficiently would be no mean feat ). Maybe, despite the obvious extreme difficulties of making this work, this is still worth looking in to? -just trying to think of the possibilities.

Here is another bit of good news in cancer research; this time, a way is found to make a drag target a mutation known to be common to many cancers that previously had seemed 'undruggable'.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-11-undruggable-mutation-six-year-effort-yields.html

Unless I am imagining this, there seems to be more progress in cancer research in recent years than ever before? (albeit still with no real massive breakthrough of the kind we all hope for )
I am hoping that all these small incremental but numerous and perhaps not insignificant breakthroughs in cancer research would eventually add up and give us effective cures for most of the types of cancers that are currently incurable.
Anyone would like to hazard a guess about how many years that would take? 2 years? 15 years? 50 years?