Could Zika Be Used As A Cancer Treatment?

This Virus Causes Damage in Babies' Brains. Now, It May Fight Brain Cancer in Adults.

Transcript

00:00 The aggressive brain cancer, glioblastoma, has proven very difficult to treat with standard cancer treatments.

00:06 But now, scientists think they might have stumbled upon a new solution, the Zika virus.

00:11 Glioblastoma is difficult to treat because it transforms normal brain cells into stem cells, which can multiply pretty much indefinitely.

00:25 So if most of the tumor is removed, even if there's one cell left, there's a high chance that it will regrow and come back.

00:32 But the Zika virus might offer a new way to target these hard-to-treat cells.

00:37 It turns out the Zika virus uses a special molecular key to interface with normal brain cells,

00:44 but also brain cancer cells. This molecular key is called an integrin, and it sits on the surface of the virus and

00:52 plugs into the cells it's going to infect, in essence. So there's a lock

00:58 that this key fits into on

01:00 every different type of brain stem cell, from healthy ones to cancerous ones.

01:05 This key is made up of two components. One half is called alpha-V and the other half is called beta-5.

01:11 The alpha-V

01:13 component appears on all different sorts of brain stem cells, from healthy to cancerous.

01:18 But the beta-5 component is fairly unique to cancerous cells. So the Zika virus actually prefers to infect

01:26 cancerous brain cells over normal ones.

01:29 Scientists think they can hack into this tendency of the virus to trick it into only affecting the

01:36 cancerous brain cells and leaving healthy brain cells alone. So far, the strategy has seemed promising in mouse studies,

01:43 but it has a long way to go before it reaches human cancer patients.

01:47 [MUSIC]