Could Zika Be Used As A Cancer Treatment?
This Virus Causes Damage in Babies' Brains. Now, It May Fight Brain Cancer in Adults.
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TechTranscript
00:00The aggressive brain cancer, glioblastoma, has proven very difficult to treat with standard cancer treatments.
00:06But now, scientists think they might have stumbled upon a new solution, the Zika virus.
00:17Glioblastoma is difficult to treat because it transforms normal brain cells into stem cells, which can multiply pretty much indefinitely.
00:25So 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.
00:32But the Zika virus might offer a new way to target these hard-to-treat cells.
00:37It turns out the Zika virus uses a special molecular key to interface with normal brain cells, but also brain cancer cells.
00:46This molecular key is called an integrin, and it sits on the surface of the virus and plugs into the cells it's going to infect, in essence.
00:56So there's a lock that this key fits into on every different type of brain stem cell, from healthy ones to cancerous ones.
01:05This key is made up of two components. One half is called alpha-V, and the other half is called beta-5.
01:12The alpha-V component appears on all different sorts of brain stem cells, from healthy to cancerous.
01:18But the beta-5 component is fairly unique to cancerous cells.
01:23So the Zika virus actually prefers to infect cancerous brain cells over normal ones.
01:29Scientists think they can hack into this tendency of the virus to trick it into only affecting the cancerous brain cells and leaving healthy brain cells alone.
01:40So far, this strategy has seemed promising in mouse studies, but it has a long way to go before it reaches human cancer patients.