WMU researcher asks: Can virus fight colon cancer?

A WMU professor is working to find out if a virus can be modified to fight colon cancer.

Dr. Karim Essani, a WMU virologist and professor of biological sciences, has been awarded $400,000 over three years by the National Institutes of Health to pursue a new treatment that if successful would fight cancer without harming healthy cells, eliminating the nausea and other side effects common with current chemotherapy treatments.

Because viruses are very specific in the cells they attack, theoretically, a virus could be developed to attack specific cancer cells and leave other cells untouched.

The WMU project will take a rare, nonfatal African virus known as the tanapox virus, which infects monkeys and humans, and use it to treat colon cancer.

The tanapox virus was chosen because it is found only in equatorial Africa and people outside that region have no immunity to it. If people were immune to the virus it would be destroyed by the body before it could attack cancer cells. It also was selected because it causes only a mild illness in humans.

Essani says the treatment he is researching involves deleting certain genes from the virus and adding other genes to enable the virus to specifically kill the cancer cells by itself, and at the same time enabling human immune system to reject cancer cells as if they are foreign transplants.

Essani and his team of three students are studying the effects in mice. They will proceed to monkeys and humans if the research goes well.

At this time, Essani is working independently rather than with a drug company, but the university does plan to patent his viruses for licensing in the future.

“There are several companies around the globe trying to develop other viruses for this purpose, and will be interested once we have sufficient data,” Essani says.

Writer: Kathy Jennings
Source: Dr. Karim Essani, Mark Schwerin, Western Michigan University