ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2007) --  An international team of researchers
led by Mayo Clinic have designed a technique that uses the body's own
cells and a virus to destroy cancer cells that spread from primary
tumors to other parts of the body through the lymphatic system. In
addition, their study shows that this technology could be the basis
for a new cancer vaccine to prevent cancer recurrence.

The technology combines infection-fighting T-cells with the vesicular
stomatitis virus that targets and destroys cancer cells while leaving
normal cells unharmed. The study, which has not yet been replicated in
humans, is significant because it describes a potential new therapy to
treat and prevent the spread of cancer in patients.

"We hope to translate these results into clinical trials. However,
until those trials are done, it's difficult to be certain that what we
see in mouse models will clearly translate to humans. We're hopeful
that will be the case," says Richard Vile, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic
specialist in molecular medicine and immunology and the study's
principal investigator.

In primary cancers of the breast, colon, prostate, head and neck and
skin, the growth of secondary tumors often pose the most threat to
patients, not the primary tumor. The prognosis for these patients
often depends upon the degree of lymph node involvement and whether
the cancer has spread.

Dr. Vile and colleagues theorized that they could control the spread
of cancer through the lymphatic system (bone marrow, spleen, thymus
and lymph nodes) by manipulating the immune system.

Researchers zeroed in on immature T-cells from bone marrow,
programming them to respond to specific threats to the immune system
while delivering a cancer-destroying virus to the tumor cells.

To deliver the virus, researchers removed T-cells from a healthy
mouse, loaded them with the virus and injected the T-cells back into
the mouse. Researchers found that once the T-cells returned to the
lymph nodes and spleen, the virus detached itself from the T-cells,
found the tumor cells, selectively replicated within them and
extracted tumor cells from those areas.

Cancer Vaccine

The procedure used in this study triggered an immune response to
cancer cells, which means that it could be used as a cancer vaccine to
prevent recurrence.

"We show that if you kill tumor cells directly in the tumor itself,
you can get a weak immunity against the tumor, but if you use this
virus to kill tumor cells in the lymph nodes, you get a higher
immunity against the tumor," Dr. Vile says.

Results

The technique used in this study successfully treated the cells of
three different diseases: melanoma, lung cancer and colorectal cancer.
The results include:

Two days after treatment, the presence of melanoma tumor cells in
lymph nodes was significantly less, but not completely gone. There
were no cancer cells in the spleen.

Ten-to-14 days after a T-cell transfer, both the lymph nodes and
spleen were free of melanoma tumor cells.

Mice treated with a single dose of the T-cells transfer developed a
potent T-cell response against melanoma tumor cells.

Although the procedure was not intended to treat the primary melanoma
tumor, significant reductions in tumor cells were observed.

In mice with lung cancer metastasis, cancer cells were significantly
reduced in one-third of mice and completely eradicated in two-thirds
of mice. Efforts to clear metastases from colorectal tumors were
similarly effective.

Lung and colorectal tumor cells were purged from lymph nodes. Also,
the spleens of mice that had lung cancer developed immunity to the
cancer after the treatment.

The technology already exists to extract T-cells from patients, attach
the virus and inject the cells back into the patients. Doctors
currently use a similar process to attach radioactive tracers to T-
cells when trying to find the source of an infection in patients.

"This is technology that is relatively easy to translate to humans
because it involves taking T-cells from the patient -- something
routinely done today -- loading them with this virus and then putting
those T-cells back into patients whose cancer has spread to lymph
nodes, are at high risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the
body or are at high risk of succumbing to the cancer," Dr. Vile says.

The study appeared in the Dec. 9 online issue of Nature Medicine.

Other authors of the study include: Jian Qiao, M.D., Ph.D.; Timothy
Kottke; Candice Willmon, Ph.D.; Feorillo Galivo; Phonphimon Wongthida;
Rosa Maria Diaz, Ph.D.; Jill Thompson and Pamela Ryno of the Molecular
Medicine Program at Mayo Clinic; Glen Barber of the Sylvester
Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami School of Medicine;
John Chester, Peter Selby and Alan Melcher of the Cancer

Research UK Clinical Centre, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and
Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Leeds, U.K.; and,
Kevin Harrington, The Institute of Cancer Research, London.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and Mayo
Clinic.

Adapted from materials provided by Mayo Clinic.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071218154220.htm

BOSTON -- What if you could pop a pill and kill cancer before you even
knew you had it? Or destroy diabetes before it destroys you? Would you
let doctors inject a tiny robot into your body that targets disease
without you even realizing it? These innovations could add decades to
your life.

The end of the road comes fast! But what if you could get an extra
mile or two, or decade or two, out of your life? A little bottle may
hold the key.

"What we're talking about is a single pill that you can take every day
that would ward off most diseases," said David Sinclair, Ph.D., a
pathologist at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Sirtris
Pharmaceuticals.

Eliminating disease
The end of the road comes fast! But what if you could get an extra
mile or two, or decade or two, out of your life? A little bottle may
hold the key.

Dr. Sinclair and his business partner, Christoph Westphal, believe
they have found an elixir for a longer life.

"We're talking about treating a very large set of very important
diseases. Really, most of the key killers of most of the western
world," explained Westphal, CEO of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.

It's a chemical found in red wine that destroys diabetes, Alzheimer's,
Parkinsons and cancer.

"Resveratrol is a molecule that comes from plants, and the way we
think it works is it binds to a protein in our cells that combats
diseases of aging," said Dr. Sinclair.

Resveratrol activates a gene called SIRT1.

"When you activate SIRT1, which is this anti-aging gene, you seem to
be able to treat disease of aging, such as diabetes," Westphal added.

SIRT1 is activated by cutting calories. Mice live much longer when
they are fed a diet with 30 percent to 40 percent fewer calories.
Resveratrol mimics caloric restriction without the strict diet that
few people are able to maintain.

"What my hope is that doctors will start to prescribe this drug for
diabetes, but doctors will also start to find that this drug starts to
do other things like protect against heart disease, cancer,
Alzheimer's. That's really what the animal models are predicting. In
mice, we see this same molecule, resveratrol, protect against all of
these major diseases," Dr. Sinclair said.

But nobody knows if resveratrol will be toxic when taken by humans.
Mice have consumed 400-milligrams of resveratrol per kilogram of body
weight without ill-effect. In fact, the rodents became sleek, slim and
powerfully athletic.

"We think that resveratrol from red wine is just the beginning. It's
more of just a proof of what's possible and what is to come," Dr.
Sinclair continued.

If the answer isn't in this pill, scientists around the globe are
banking on nanotechnology to add years to everyone's life. These tiny
robots would exist inside the human body, small enough to assemble and
re-assemble molecular parts to detect and even prevent disease.

Nanotechnology is being used now in Germany to kill prostate cancer.
Particles of iron so tiny you cannot see them with the human eye are
injected into the prostate.

"They have been shown not only to infiltrate tissues if you inject
them directly into a tumor, but also, they can selectively go into
tumor cells," said Manfred Johannsen, M.D., a urologist at Charité
Hospital in Berlin.

The nanoparticles are heated to extremely high temperatures by a
magnetic field, literally burning out the cancer.

"This green is the prostate and the blue spots are nanoparticle
deposits," Dr. Johannsen added.

But this is just the beginning of nanotechnology.

"We would like to inject them into the veins and they would find their
way into the organ that needs to be treated," Dr. Johannsen said.

At Johns Hopkins, researchers have encapsulated the anti-cancer agent
curcumin in nanoparticles. At Northwestern, paralyzed mice were
injected with nanoliquid. Six weeks later, they could walk. Right now,
both are just in studies, but we could realize the benefits of
nanotechnology in the next 10 to 20 years.

"Our goal is to keep people out of nursing homes, instead of extend
the time they're in nursing homes," Dr. Sinclair said.

But neither of these breakthroughs is a guarantee.

"It's very hard to make living things live forever. The ravages of
time are very hard on the body," Dr. Sinclair said.

But we want to make sure we're on the road as long as possible, and by
eliminating disease, we can make our life's journey last even longer.

As for the magic pill, scientists are now working on molecules up to
1,000 times more potent and active than resveratrol. Human clinical
trials will start next year. Dr. Sinclair believes a pill to fight
heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's could hit the market in the next
five years. Nanotechnology clinical trials are already underway and
are expected to be mainstream in the next decade. If you think just
drinking red wine will do the trick, think again. It would take 1,000
glasses of red wine to equal the resveratrol found in just one pill.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Sirtris Pharmaceuticals
http://www.sirtrispharma.com
i...@sirtrispharma.com

Ray and Terry's Longevity Products
http://www.rayandterrys.com
(877) 263-8263
http://www.kurzweilai.net

http://news14.com/content/headlines/590464/eliminating-disease/Defaul...

By Tom Corwin| Staff Writer

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Yukai He has to badge his way through three locked doors to get into
his lab at Medical College of Georgia Cancer Research Center, steps
that he jokes about circumventing. The virus he works with, the
lentivirus, isn't a biological threat. But one day he and MCG
researcher David Munn would like to make it part of a potent cancer
vaccine that would be part of a sophisticated way to knock out tumors.

The lentivirus is a hybrid that has had all of the virulent proteins
that make people sick removed. It is now merely a vehicle, called a
vector, for delivering something inside of a cell. In this case, it
would be a protein taken from a cancerous tumor.

Scientists have been working diligently for decades on a cancer
vaccine, trying to train the immune system to recognize a cancer and
dispatch it, but none have worked. There are probably several reasons,
one of which Dr. Munn has been studying for the past 10 years. It is a
chemical called indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase, or IDO for short.

Dr. Munn and Dr. Andrew Mellor first identified it as the mechanism
that protects the developing fetus, and its foreign genetic material
from the father, from the mother's immune system. Unfortunately, many
tumors also use it to create a "tolerance" for themselves from the
immune system. The first cancer patient to try a drug that suppresses
IDO was enrolled last month at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.,
and the IDO suppressor will also begin early clinical trials within
the next six months at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The suppressor might not be sufficient to get rid of a tumor, Dr. Munn
said.

"It might be that taking away all of the brakes still isn't going to
give the train a push forward," he said.

Dr. He is the first vaccine recruit to MCG, with the idea of
stimulating the immune system to recognize and attack the tumor. The
problem with previous vaccines is that, even when they stimulate a
potent response, the tumor is unfazed.

"There have been a couple of papers in the last year or two pointing
out the sad fact that you can get really, really good responses to
these vaccines and the tumor still doesn't shrink and go away," Dr.
Munn said.

That is what led Dr. He to leave the University of Pittsburgh and come
to MCG for four months to work on the IDO problem with those he called
"the pioneers in the field."

The vaccine approach, using the lentivirus, should have some
advantages over other approaches that used different virus delivery
vehicles, such as the adenovirus that causes many common colds. The
problem with using that virus is half of the population already have a
neutralizing antibody to the adenovirus from a previous infection, Dr.
He said.

"So in that case, in 50 percent of people it won't work," he said. The
lentivirus is a hybrid that the immune system hasn't seen before.

Another problem with the adenovirus vehicle is it can provoke an
immune response to itself instead of the cancer protein it is trying
to deliver, which derails the immune response, Dr. He said. The
lentivirus is innocuous enough that it won't provoke an immune
response on its own, he said.

Yet it appears to be able to infect a key type of cell that can train
the killer T cells of the immune system to recognize proteins, in this
case proteins to the tumor, and it appears to have a long-lasting
effect, Dr. He said. The virus also cannot reproduce itself inside a
cell.

"That's a safety point," Dr. He said.

If the IDO inhibitor proves to be nontoxic and well-tolerated by
patients, which Dr. Munn suspects it will be, it can be tried with
conventional chemotherapy. That could lead to adding immunotherapy.

"That will create what I think of as a window of opportunity for the
immune system to respond," Dr. Munn said. "But it doesn't necessarily
give it much of a kick to respond."

"And the (cancer vaccine) probably has a better chance of really
kicking off the immune response," Dr. He said.

"This is going to wind up being a multipronged approach to this
disease," Dr. Munn said.

MCG is looking at other centers to see whether its combination
approach can be combined with other drugs and therapies, he said.

"There's a lot of interest in the field right now in combining
different people's individual single strategies together into
rationally designed regimens," Dr. Munn said. "MCG has an opportunity
to become a major player in that area in part because we have a
reputation for our particular little area that we work in, which is
the IDO (approach)."

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.cor...@augustachronicle.com.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/120907/met_176094.shtml

By Coloradoan staff

InViragen, a small biotechnology company in Fort Collins, received a
two-year $600,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to work
with the University of Wisconsin to develop a safe and effective avian
flu vaccine.

The grant will fund construction and testing of novel vaccines
designed to protect against the H5N1 avian flu virus.

"This new project combines Inviragen's expertise in genetic
engineering of vaccines for respiratory diseases with the influenza
expertise at the University of Wisconsin," InViragen CEO Dan
Stinchcomb said in a statement.

Stinchcomb was not available for comment Tuesday.

InViragen also announced it was received financial support from the
Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative to pay for InViragen's dengue
vaccine in preparation for testing in human clinical trials.

About 100 million people living mostly in tropical and subtropical
countries are infected with Dengue fever each year.

In Viragen's dengue vaccine was designed through a collaboration with
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins.

For more on this story see Wednesday's Coloradoan.

http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071127/UPDATES...

Ref:
http://www.inviragen.com/index.php

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Scientist Mark Young brought out a small bag of green- and yellow-
coated chocolate candies to explain something cool about viruses.

"A virus is an M&M," Young said. "It has a hard shell on the outside
made of protein, and inside, the soft gooey stuff is DNA or RNA."

Young, a 50-year-old professor of plant science at Montana State
University, grinned as he got into one of his favorite subjects.

Most people would say viruses are nasty bugs that make us horribly
sick. Young would argue the virus has gotten a bad rap.

In fact, Young and Trevor Douglas, 45, an MSU chemistry professor, are
working together on engineering viruses to benefit people's health --
"Making Friends from Old Foes," as their paper last year in the
journal Science put it.

Their enthusiasm for viruses is infectious.

That passion for discovering new things often takes Young and Douglas
to Yellowstone National Park. There they prospect for new discoveries
in the weird environment of Yellowstone's hot springs, finding
previously unknown families of viruses that are so tough, they thrive
in the equivalent of boiling battery acid.

They are excited about seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake. But
they also say that from such basic science may come breakthroughs to
solve real-life problems - like finding new ways to fight cancer or
make clean hydrogen fuel.

They've been successful in winning serious money -- millions of
dollars in research grants, yet they defy the popular stereotype of
scientists. Rather than being cooped up in a musty lab all the time,
they backpack gear into Yellowstone National Park to hunt for new
viruses. They're talk about their work with the excitement of kids and
they like to joke around.

Their work at MSU's Thermal Biology Institute and Center for Bio-
Inspired NanoMaterials has been featured on the PBS show "Wired
Science." They've appeared with other MSU scientists in a new
documentary, "Invisible Yellowstone," that's being sent to classrooms
around Montana to pique students' interest in science.

Asked if he's gone Hollywood, Young joked that his own kids have told
him, "Don't quit your day job."

All in all, they make the day job of a scientist seem pretty cool.

"This is, first and foremost, fun for us," Douglas said. "It's a
blast."

Hitching a ride

A virus is essentially a lifelike parasite, Young explained, and while
some are deadly to humans, many are benign.

"The only job of all viruses is to get into a cell, use its genetic
material to make copies, and get out of the cell," Young said. "The
job of a virus is not to cause disease. It's not to the benefit of a
virus to kill its host."

Young and Douglas started working together a decade ago. They were
excited about the same idea, though it seemed "wacky" at the time.

What if you could strip out the center of a virus and leave just a
harmless shell? Could you use it like a container? Like a box or a
coffee cup? Could you do the same thing with human molecules? Could
you use the empty shells to hold something useful?

"It was such a cool idea," Douglas said. And it worked.

Two years later, their paper on "virus protein cages" was published in
Nature.

Ultimately they started MSU's Center for Bio-Inspired NanoMaterials. A
nanometer is about 10 atoms in size - a strand of hair is about 1,000
nanometers across.

The green and yellow chocolates candies, which they use as teaching
tools on visits to Bozeman and Belgrade seventh-graders, have "Nano
Virus" printed on their sides.

The two scientists are experimenting with "decorating" the outside of
their nano-shells with a small protein or antibody that can act like
an address or zip code, to get their nano-containers to stick to the
exact location where they're needed.

Two of their ideas of using the nano-containers to benefit human
health are now undergoing animal trials with mice in California.

One would use nano-containers for "smart" drug delivery and send
cancer-fighting drugs straight to breast cancer tumors. If it works,
it could allow doctors to use just enough of a drug to kill tumors,
instead of flooding patients' entire bodies with large amounts of
chemotherapy drugs that have severe side effects.

The other idea would use nano-containers to get magnetic materials to
stick to life-threatening plaque in patients' arteries, thus improving
detection with an MRI.

Both ideas have a long ways to go before they're ready to try on
people.

"The good thing is, it's working," Young said of the smart drug
delivery trial. "You can administer far less drug when it's inside the
'cage' than when it's free."

What they're doing, Young said, is taking advantage of what viruses
already do really well -- moving between cells, surviving in difficult
environments, and attaching to host cells.

"We're just hitching a ride," Young said, "on what evolution has
driven these boxes or containers to do."

At the same time, they're working with John Peters, 42, a chemistry
professor and Thermal Biology Institute director, to see if they can
use sunlight to make hydrogen as alternative to fossil fuels.

Once again they're taking advantage of a natural material, the protein
hydrogenase, which rips apart water molecules to make hydrogen, trying
to see if that might be harnessed or mimicked to make hydrogen on a
much bigger scale. They're tinkering with a biological molecule called
ferritin, which scavenges iron, removing its natural cargo and
replacing it with a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions.

Peters said the purple sulfur bacteria he's been working with is from
Russia, but it's similar to bacteria found in Yellowstone's Mammoth
hot springs. Because they thrive at high temperatures, such bacteria
could help make a tougher, more robust catalyst.

It's too soon to tell, but if it works it might someday produce
cleaner fuel for cars.

Taking risks

Last week, Douglas playfully kicked a blue plastic sphere down the
hall of MSU's new $23 million Chemistry and Biochemistry Building,
where he and Young have been moving into their new offices and
adjoining labs.

The geometric blue sphere looked like the skeleton of a soccer ball.
Most viruses, Douglas said, are like are built in this soccer-ball
shape. It's very stable, he said, even beautiful.

Now that they know that different viruses and similarly shaped
molecules can be used as containers, they want to come up with a
"library" of nano-containers of different sizes.

"If you want an espresso, you want a little cup," Douglas said, "not a
wading pool."

Douglas's fascination with containers goes back a long ways. He was a
potter in his native South Africa. He left the country at age 17,
turning his back on a war he didn't believe in, and arrived in England
with just $120 in his pocket. He made pottery in London, lived in a
Buddhist monastery in Idaho, and finally started college at Boise
State.

"I took a chemistry class, and that was it," Douglas said. "Suddenly,
it all made sense."

Young also followed an unconventional path. After graduating from UC
Berkeley, he worked as a back country ranger for the U.S. Forest
Service in Wyoming's Wind River Range. Later he bummed through Asia
with his future wife, and they lived for a time in Australia.

Young said he believes in taking risks. His tendency to be outspoken
makes Douglas shake his head. One day in 2004, MSU administrators and
scientists crowded into a room on campus to hail then-Sen. Conrad
Burns, R-Mont., as a "champion of science" for bringing MSU millions
of federal dollars to support its research.

Young spoke up, saying he was "a die-hard Democrat" who'd already told
Burns he would probably never vote for him, "ever." But Young told the
gathering, "It gets harder every year, because he does amazing things
for science every year."

Reminded of his comment, he laughed.

"Well, that was totally honest," Young said.

"There's a rebel in a lot of scientists," he said later. "You always
question what's going on."

Kids in a candy store

In one room of their brand new laboratories, a machine gently shakes
long-necked glass beakers that hold viruses and host cells from
Yellowstone, which are sitting in a 178-degree hot water bath to
simulate the hot pots.

The beakers smell like "dirty socks," Young said.

Douglas used to be in Gaines Hall, which he described as a "dirty
little hovel, nasty and unsafe."

The scientists are enthusiastic about their new digs and enthusiastic
about their chance to make new discoveries.

It's an enthusiasm they try to share with kids when they visit local
schools, to let students, especially girls, know how fun science can
be.

"It's really like being a kid in a candy store," Douglas said. "You
get to ask questions that are exciting to you and then answer them."

"It's incredibly addicting," Young said, to find out things that no
one else has known before. "It's an amazingly exhilarating feeling."

Someday when he's old and "still skiing at Bridger Bowl," Young said,
he'd "love to look back (and say) we contributed to advances in
medicine and materials science.

"We're not going to change to world," Young said, "but we're going to
make little stabs at it."

Gail Schontzler is at ga...@dailychronicle.com

http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2007/11/25/news/20virus...

Smart Drug Developed to Show, Treat Cancer

Yonsei University's nano-drug team poses for a photo on Thursday. From
left: medical professors Hur Yong-min and Suh Jin-suck, and chemical
engineering professor Haam Seung-joo. / Courtesy of Ministry of
Science and Technology

By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter

A team of Yonsei University researchers have developed an anticancer
drug that not only treats cancer but also diagnoses the disease by
highlighting tumor cells in MRI images.

The researchers - chemical engineering professor Haam Seung-joo and
medical professors Suh Jin-suck and Hur Yong-min - said that the
``multi-purpose nano compound'' has proven to be effective in animal
tests, and clinical tests will begin soon. They said that they are in
a partnership with ATGen, a biomedical venture firm, to commercialize
the drug.

The encapsulated ``smart'' drug is tens to hundreds of nanometers in
size, allowing particles to penetrate deep into tissues and bind to
specific cancer cells. As the particles contain a magnetic component,
they are shown highlighted by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) along
with the cells to which they are attached.

The tiny capsules also carry a tumor antibody called Herceptin. In
mouse test, cancer cells treated with this nano-drug shrank to one
sixth the size of cancer cells left untreated, the Yonsei team said.

``Like a high-precision guided missile, the nano-compound can bind to
cancer cells in the human body and slowly release the anticancer
drug,'' the team said in a press release on Friday. `` It enables
visual monitoring of the condition of cancer cells as well.''

The team has been studying the search-and-destroy technique for years
and has filed several patents in the United States and in South Korea.
Other scientists, including researchers at the Gwangju Institute of
Science and Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
have been conducting similar projects.

indi...@koreatimes.co.kr

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2007/11/133_13943.html

By KEVIN CRUSH, SUN MEDIA

Viruses are being linked to certain types of cancer, say medical
officials.

But people shouldn't be too concerned because chances are slim, said
Capital Health medical officer of health Dr. Gerry Predy.

"Most of the common viruses that are around don't cause people to be
more susceptible to cancer, so in most cases it's not that much of a
concern."

At least three viruses have been shown to be linked to cancer
development.

The human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes genital warts, can lead
to cervical cancer in a fraction of cases. Hepatitis B and C
infections have been linked to liver cancer while the Epstein-Barr
virus, found mostly in Asia, has been linked to cancers of the nose.

In those cases, Predy said the virus is just one factor that leads to
the cancer. There has to be something else present, like a person's
environment or their genetics, to combine with the virus to lead to
the cancer. Predy said that process is a mystery.

Other viruses, like the common cold, have not been linked to cancer.

It just all points to the need for infection prevention, said Predy,
such as wearing condoms, getting vaccines or not sharing needles.

On the flip side, viruses are also helping in the battle against
cancer.

Researchers like Dr. David Evans with the University of Alberta's
department of medical microbiology and immunology are working with
viruses to kill cancer tumours.

A virus is inserted into a tumour and allowed to grow and overwhelm
the tumour.

However, Evans said more research has to be done before viruses can be
used as an effective cancer killer.

One hurdle Evans and other researchers are facing is a person's immune
system has to be suppressed in order for it to work, but that could
lead to complications such as the virus harming the patient.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/World/2007/11/16/4660225-sun.html

Toledo, OH | Posted on November 14th, 2007

Abstract:

Researchers in Ohio report the development of magnetic nanoparticles
that show promise for quickly detecting and eliminating E. coli,
anthrax, and other harmful bacteria. In laboratory studies, the
nanoparticles helped detect a strain of E. coli within five minutes
and removed 88 percent of the target bacteria, the scientists say.
Their study is scheduled for the Nov. 7 issue of the Journal of the
American Chemical Society, a weekly publication.

Magnetic nanoparticles detect and remove harmful bacteria:

Xuefei Huang and colleagues point out that ongoing incidents of
produce contamination and the threat of bioterrorist attacks have
created an urgent need for quicker, more effective ways to detect
bacterial decontamination. To meet that need, they developed a
"magnetic glyco-nanoparticle (MGNP)," a unique compound that combines
magnetic nanoparticles with sugars.

Sugars (or carbohydrates) on cell surfaces are used by many bacteria
to attach to their host cells in order to facilitate infection. The
scientists exposed a group of E. coli bacteria to the sugar-coated
nano-magnets to mark the microbes so they could be easily identified
and removed by a magnetic device. The researchers also used the
particles to distinguish between three different E. coli strains.

The study represents "the first time that magnetic nanoparticles have
been used to detect, quantify, and differentiate E. coli cells," the
researchers state.

####

For more information, please click here

Contacts:
Science Inquiries: Michael Woods, editor
m_wo...@acs.org

General Inquiries: Michael Bernstein
m_bernst...@acs.org
202-872-4400

Xuefei Huang, Ph.D.
The University of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio 43606
Phone: 419-530-1507
Fax: 419-530-4033
xuefei.hu...@utoledo.edu

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=26336

Nov 9, 2007

Targeted cancer therapy involves delivery of a tumouricidal agent - be
it heat, radiation, cytotoxic drugs or antibodies - directly to the
tumour cells in order to effect selective cancer destruction with
minimal damage to healthy tissue. In research published last week, two
innovative schemes for performing targeted treatment are proposed: RF-
induced heating of nanotubes and UV activation of therapeutic
antibodies.

First up, a team led by scientists at the M D Anderson Cancer Center
(Houston, TX) and Rice University (Houston, TX) has demonstrated that
cancer cells treated with carbon nanotubes can be destroyed by
exposure to radio waves (Cancer 2007 doi: 10.1002/cncr.23155).

Carbon nanotubes - hollow cylinders of pure carbon - release heat when
exposed to a radiofrequency (RF) field. If the nanotubes are localized
within tumours, this thermal effect will destroy the cancer cells.
Without such a target, the radio waves pass harmlessly through the
body.

In preclinical experiments, the researchers injected a solution of
single-walled carbon nanotubes directly into liver tumours in four
rabbits. The rabbits were then exposed to a 13.56 MHz RF field for two
minutes, resulting in complete destruction of their tumours. No side
effects were noted, although some healthy liver tissue within 2-5 mm
of the tumours sustained heat damage due to nanotube leakage. Control
tumours, which were treated only by RF exposure or only by nanotube
injection, were unaffected.

"These are promising, even exciting, preclinical results in this
liver-
cancer model," said Steven Curley, professor in M D Anderson's
department of surgical oncology. "Our next step is to look at ways to
more precisely target the nanotubes so they attach to, and are taken
up by, cancer cells while avoiding normal tissue."

Research is now underway to bind the nanotubes to antibodies, peptides
or other agents that target molecules expressed on cancer cells, which
would allow sole targeting of the nanotubes to the tumour cells. As RF
fields penetrate deep into tissue, once this targeting is achieved, it
will be possible to heat up nanotubes anywhere within the body. Curley
estimates that a clinical trial is at least three to four years away.

***************************************

Ultraviolet action
Meanwhile, scientists at Newcastle University in the UK have developed
a cancer therapy that uses UV light to activate antibodies, which then
specifically attack tumours. Therapeutic antibodies have long been
recognised as having excellent potential but getting them to
efficiently target tumour cells has proved tricky.

To address this problem, the Newcastle researchers have developed a
way to "cloak" the antibodies by coating their surface with a photo-
cleavable organic oil, which prevents the antibody from reacting
within the body. The cloaked antibodies can be reactivated by
irradiation with UV-A light (ChemMedChem 2007 doi: 10.1002/cmdc.
200700200).

Once reactivated, the antibodies bind to T-cells, the body's own
defence system, and trigger them to target the surrounding tissue. The
researchers also demonstrated that activating the cloaked antibodies
near to a tumour will destroy it - effectively enabling antibody
targeting by simply shining UV light at the relevant area of the body
(ChemMedChem 2007 doi: 10.1002/cmdc.200700116).

"A patient coming in for treatment of bladder cancer would receive an
injection of the cloaked antibodies," explained Colin Self, professor
of clinical biochemistry. "She would sit in the waiting room for an
hour and then come back in for treatment by light. Just a few minutes
of the light therapy directed at the region of the tumour would
activate the T-cells causing her body's own immune system to attack
the tumour."

Self cited one example in which this treatment is used on patients
undergoing surgery for prostate cancer. "After the surgeon has removed
the bulk of a tumour, the patient could then be injected with
bispecific antibodies and a light shone at the affected area," he
explained. "This would target the patient's own immune system to the
tumour site."

BioTransformations, the company set up by Self to develop this
technology, is looking to begin clinical trials on patients with
secondary skin cancers in early 2008.
About the author

Tami Freeman is science editor on medicalphysicsweb.

http://medicalphysicsweb.org/cws/article/research/31766

Posted: November 8, 2007

(Nanowerk News) Magnetic nanoparticles heated by a remote magnetic
field have the potential to release multiple anticancer drugs on
demand at the site of a tumor, according to a study published in the
journal Advanced Materials. Moreover, say the investigators who
conducted this research, these same nanoparticles can do double duty
as tumor imaging agents.

Two investigators from the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer-
Sangeeta Bhatia, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., Burnham Institute-led this research
effort, which has the ultimate goal of developing a targeted,
multifunctional nanoparticle capable of providing time-tailored drug
release into tumors. To create such a platform, the investigators
started with dextran-coated iron oxide nanoparticles similar to the
ones now under development as magnetic resonance imaging contrast
agents. When stimulated by an oscillating magnetic field, these
nanoparticles absorb energy and become warm, a property that the
researchers capitalized on to create triggered drug release.

To these particles the researchers added a short piece of DNA to act
as a tether for one or more anticancer drugs linked to pieces of DNA
complementary to the particle-bound tether. At body temperature, the
complementary strands of DNA form the famous double helix, creating a
stable link between drug molecule and nanoparticle. But when the
nanoparticle becomes warm as a result of an applied oscillating
magnetic field, the bonds holding the two strands of DNA together
become progressively weaker until the local temperature hits a
critical value, at which point the double helix unwinds and the drug
molecule diffuses away from the nanoparticle. The researchers also
showed that when they applied the magnetic field in pulses of 5
minutes duration every 40 minutes, drug release occured in bursts,
too.

Since this "melting temperature" depends on the length of the double
helix, the investigators reasoned that they could use tethers of
different lengths to produce one nanoparticle capable of releasing two
or more drugs in sequence. Indeed, when the researchers attached two
different model drug compounds to the nanoparticle using tethers of
two different lengths, they were able to trigger release of the drug
attached via the shorter tether and follow that with release of the
second drug, attached with the longer tether, by increasing the power
of the oscillating magnetic field.

This work, which was funded by the NCI's Alliance for Nanotechnology
in Cancer, is detailed in the paper "Remotely triggered release from
magnetic nanoparticles." Investigators from the University of
California, San Diego, also participated in this study. This paper was
published online in advance of print publication. An abstract of this
paper is not yet available.

Source: National Cancer Institute

http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=3230.php

By Emily Fata

Publication Date: 11/08/07

Staff Reporter

Recent discoveries in the biomedical engineering lab at Purdue show
that a potential treatment for cancer may loom in the future.

Ji-Xin Cheng, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and
Alexander Wei, an associate professor of chemistry, have collaborated
research efforts to publish a paper that illustrates the fatal effects
gold nanorods can have on cancerous cells.

Gold nanorods have long been known as a potential threat to tumors
because of their ability to absorb a laser's infrared light.

In the past, scientists and medical researchers have experimented with
tiny gold rods, typically less than 15 nanometers wide and 50
nanometers long, attempting to find cures for various types of cancer.
Past discoveries have proven that combining these rods with molecules
of folic acid will allow them to attach to a tumor's receptors after
being released into the bloodstream. The attached rods can then absorb
the infrared light released by a laser and the tumor will be
destroyed.

Most scientists have typically assumed the cell is simply destroyed by
overheating, but Cheng and Wei's scientific research proves otherwise.

After performing intense experimentation on throat and breast cancer
cells in the laboratory, the duo discovered that inserting these
nanorods actually destroys the cell by poking holes in the outer
membrane and then allowing an influx of calcium from the blood stream
to flow through.

"If you change the balance of calcium in the cell, it will die," Wei
said, elaborating on their new discovery.

Despite their recent success, Cheng and Wei show no signs of delaying
their research in this competitive field.

"We're always looking to the future," Wei said.

The scientists are looking to gain approval from the National Cancer
Institute to begin performing more pre-clinical testing. They also
plan to work closely with Purdue vet students in the months to come as
the project gains more funding from the federal government.

The Purdue Cancer Center fully supports Cheng and Wei in their efforts
to find a cure for this deadly disease.

"We're extremely excited about it," said Marietta Harrison, associate
director of Purdue's Cancer Center. "It will take a while to establish
the parameters, but I think nanorod technology can be very useful in
the treatment of certain cases."

http://www.purdueexponent.org/?module=article&story_id=8297

9 hours ago [Nov. 9, 2007]

TORONTO - Canadian and U.S. scientists have identified a potential new
"Trojan Horse" method for creating a vaccine against AIDS, even as
repeated efforts by researchers to prevent HIV infection using
traditional immunization approaches continue to fail.

Instead of trying to directly target the rapidly mutating human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the scientists suggest a vaccine could
take aim at what's known as fossil DNA - genetic material from ancient
viruses that has inserted itself into every human cell over our
evolutionary history.

In a study published Friday in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the
researchers say it appears that HIV reactivates this usually dormant
DNA - called human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs - by disrupting
the normal controls that keep it in check.

The study found that in some HIV-positive individuals, infection-
fighting T cells are able to target HERV-enabled cells, said co-
principal author Brad Jones, a PhD candidate in immunology at the
University of Toronto.

Jones said a huge stumbling block for scientists and drug companies
seeking an effective vaccine is that HIV is like a moving target - it
exists in many variations and constantly mutates.

"If we can find other ways for the immune system to target HIV-
infected cells, we can overcome this problem in making an HIV
vaccine," co-author Dr. Keith Garrison, a postdoctoral fellow in
experimental medicine at the University of California, San Francisco,
said in a statement. "HERV may provide us with a good target to test."

In the latest setback, drugmaker Merck and Co. announced Wednesday
that an experimental AIDS vaccine not only failed to work, but
volunteers who got the shots were more likely to get infected with the
virus through sex or other risky behaviours than those who got dummy
inoculations.

Merck had already announced in late September that it was stopping its
trial because the vaccine did not work, begging the question whether
that failure is a harbinger of a similar fate for a number of other
AIDS vaccines now being tested.

Traditional vaccines work by stimulating a response by key immune
system cells to seek out and destroy foreign invaders like bacteria
and viruses. But because HIV is an extremely adaptable retrovirus, it
seems able to foil attempts by the immune system to shut it down.

In fact, it uses the body's own immune T cells as an incubator to make
copies of itself, before spreading its progeny to other host cells.

Even if a traditional vaccine does elicit an immune response, "the
virus may still be able to escape," said Jones. "So it may not matter
how hard we hit it."

But because HERVs are already part of our genetic makeup, they are
virtually unable to mutate, he said. "So there's a great advantage in
that in targeting HERV."

That's where the Trojan Horse idea comes in: HIV activates HERVs
within the cell it enters, so a vaccine that takes aim to destroy
HERVs will incidentally kill HIV and stop it from jumping to other
cells.

"We think this is an opportunity where we can actually use the fact
that HIV has to disrupt these (HERV) control mechanisms, has to
therefore result in expression of these HERVs, use that back against
HIV as a way of targeting HIV-infected cells," Jones explained.

"So we basically think they're a proxy for HIV infected cells."

In their study, the researchers looked at 29 people who were recently
infected with HIV and compared them to 13 HIV-negative individuals and
three others infected with hepatitis C but not the AIDS virus. In the
group recently infected with HIV, they found a relationship between
the degrees of T-cell response to HERVs and the levels of HIV virus
present in their blood.

Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, scientific director and program leader of
the Canadian Network for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics (CANVAC),
said targeting HERV "certainly would not be my approach."

"But right now even the most rational approach has not yielded any
good results," said Sekaly, a professor of immunology at the
University of Montreal who was not involved in the study.

"To try something which is totally outside of the box certainly merits
some consideration," he said, while cautioning that the Toronto-UCSF
results need to be confirmed by other researchers.

Jones agreed that although the evidence his group found is
encouraging, it's still early days.

"This is fairly preliminary and even though we think it's a really
fascinating idea, there's a long way to go before it's a vaccine."

http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hqjB_MZbpHKbTKmH0wHlvW7...

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http://tinyurl.com/3xprek

        PUB. APP. NO.   Title
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http://tinyurl.com/3xprek

Malorye Allison 11/6/07

If all goes as planned, Cambridge-based RNAi pioneer Alnylam (NASDAQ:
ALNY) will be celebrating Thanksgiving with a new competitor in its
backyard, in the form of Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a brand-new startup
fueled by about $13 million from Oxford Biosciences. Dicerna
capitalizes on a new approach to making gene-silencing medicines that
sprang from the laboratory of a co-founder, John Rossi, at City of
Hope in Duarte, CA.

If Rossi gets his wish, even more little RNAi companies will soon
follow.

"There's always a need for more companies, so you can treat more
diseases," Rossi says. But before, "Nobody else could make [RNAi-based
drugs] unless you wanted to get a license from Alnylam."

Though some people argue that Alnylam has oversold its position, many
observers agree with Rossi that the Cambridge firm's patent portfolio
gives it a big competitive advantage in the RNAi therapeutics arena.
But because Dicerna is built around a new approach to RNAi, Rossi
says, "we've just formed a company whose choices are wide open."
Dicerna hasn't yet selected which diseases it will target, and its IP
is still at the application stage, but according to Rossi the company
will provide licenses to others as well as developing its own
therapeutics.

It's not too surprising that Rossi is the catalyst of this new
endeavor. Though he keeps a lower profile than some of RNAi's other
big names, he is one of the most widely respected and prolific
pioneers of research into applying the technique-in which short
strands of RNA are used to turn genes off-to treat diseases. His lab
is working at the field's cutting edge, doing some of the earliest
human trials (in HIV patients). That work involves tinkering with the
molecules themselves: Changing their chemical makeup even slightly can
make them more powerful or less likely to cause side effects.

It was through such tinkering that Rossi made a surprising discovery.

Previously, like most other experts, Rossi believed that the specific
length of Alnylam's RNAs was ideal for gene silencing. But while
trying to get better results in his experiments, "We noticed that if
[the strands] were a bit longer we got more potent knockdown," Rossi
says. It was good news that the longer strands actually worked. The
fact that they seem to work better than the short ones is even more
exciting-more powerful knockdown should mean that less drug is needed.

Dicerna cofounder Mark Behlke, a vice president at Coralville, IA-
based biotech supplier Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), heard Rossi
give a talk about this approach and the two soon became collaborators.
They ended up developing these new "dicer substrate siRNAs" jointly.
Dicer is the natural cellular machinery that chops these longer RNA
strands up and turns them into silencing tools. City of Hope and IDT
own the patents on the technology, which Dicerna has now licensed.

With two of its founders out of state, how did Dicerna wind up in
Boston? For one thing, the company's VC backers, its CEO, and a third
co-founder-Doug Fambrough, a partner at Oxford who will be chairman of
the board-are here. What's more, says Rossi, "Boston is a rich
environment for drawing upon highly trained personnel and provides a
rich intellectual environment for employees, such as seminars,
collaborations and other business related activities."

Dicerna is scheduled to be formally launched in November. That news
broke ahead of when the startup wished it would on the In Vivo blog
last week. "The financing has not been finalized, but we're
anticipating $13 million, and we're not looking for additional
financing at this time," says Fambrough.

Rossi feels efforts at commercializing RNAi have lagged recently. (The
first drug based on the technology has yet to be approved). He says
that since Merck gobbled up Alnylam rival Sirna, "We don't know what
is going on there." Another player, CytRx, recently spun out its RNAi
therapeutics program into a new subsidiary called RXi, but has not yet
announced any product candidates. "Alnylam is really the only company
doing very much right now," he says.

Rossi is heartened that more new companies are forming, however. "I've
heard of a couple, but they are not public yet," he says. With Dicerna
now adding to the IP mix, things could get even more interesting.

Though he points to challenges ahead, such as choosing the right
disease targets and overcoming the drug-delivery hurdles facing all
RNAi efforts, Rossi is confident that things will indeed get
interesting. "These drugs are going to move faster than others," Rossi
says. "The discovery [of RNAi] was only made 9 years ago, and now
there are already clinical trials. How long did it take to get the
first monoclonal antibodies that far?"

http://www.xconomy.com/2007/11/06/will-it-rain-rnai-companies-dicerna...