Camouflaging an impotent AIDS virus in new clothes enables it to hunt down metastasized melanoma cells in living mice, reports a UCLA AIDS Institute study in the Feb. 13 online edition of Nature Medicine. The scientists added the protein that makes fireflies glow to the virus in order to track its journey from the bloodstream to new tumors in the animals’ lungs.
“For the past 20 years, gene therapy has been hampered by the lack of a good carrier for therapeutic genes that can travel through the blood and aim itself at a precise location, thereby minimizing harmful side effects,” explained Irvin S.Y. Chen, Ph.D., director of the UCLA AIDS Institute. “Our approach proves that it is possible to develop an effective carrier and reprogram it to target specific cells in the body.”
The UCLA team employed a two-step approach to transform HIV into a cancer-seeking machine. First, the scientists used a version of HIV from which the viral pieces that cause AIDS had been removed. This allowed the virus to infect cells and spread throughout the body without provoking disease.
“The disarmed AIDS virus acts like a Trojan horse &endash; transporting therapeutic agents to a targeted part of the body, such as the lungs, where tumors often spread,” said Chen, a professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
