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Cancer vaccines
A vaccine for brain cancer?
May 29th 2008
From The Economist print edition
CERVICAL cancer is caused by a virus. That has been known for some time and it has led to a vaccine that seems to prevent it. Since then, researchers have been looking for other cancers that may be caused by viruses, to see if they too can be prevented. And they seem to have found one—one of the most feared of all. A piece of research expected to be unveiled on June 1st by Duane Mitchell of Duke University in North Carolina, at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, hints that glioblastomas, the most lethal form of brain tumour, may also be susceptible to vaccination.
The story began a few years ago when Charles Cobbs of the California Pacific Medical Centre Research Institute in San Francisco found something odd about glioblastomas. He noticed they usually have a form of herpes, called cytomegalovirus, active within them. It is not that catching cytomegalovirus automatically causes a brain tumour—the virus is found, inactive, in about 80% of the population. Nevertheless, there is clearly some connection between virus and tumour, a connection reinforced by Dr Cobbs's discovery that the virus appears to dwell inside the tumour but not in the healthy tissue surrounding it. This led him to speculate that the virus may be creating the tumour as a safe haven to support its own existence.…
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