( Researchers at The University of Texas ...)New hybrid virus provides targeted molecular imaging of cancer

Researchers say the advance, reported in the journal Cell, is potentially an important step in making human cancer both more visible and accessible to treatment; it may also allow prediction and monitoring of how specific anti-cancer agents are actually working.

"In tumor-bearing mice, we show that this hybrid virus can target tumors systemically to deliver an imaging or therapeutic gene," says the co-leader of the study, Renata Pasqualini, Ph.D., professor of Medicine and Cancer Biology. "The signal is specific only to tumors, so one can monitor drug effectiveness at the molecular level."

The team created and characterized the hybrid viruses by combining genetic elements and biological attributes of an animal virus (adeno-associated virus, or AAV) with those of a bacterial virus (phage). Unlike animal viruses that infect mammalian cells, bacterial viruses have evolved to infect only bacterial hosts. The paper shows how particles of the hybrid virus, called AAV phage or AAVP, can serve as a vehicle for targeted delivery of genes to experimental tumors in mice and to the tumors' blood vessel supply, providing a strategy for finding tumors and genetically marking them for imaging on a clinic-ready body scanner.

The AAVP hybrid combines the ability of the bacterial virus to target specific tissues with the capability of the mammalian virus to actually deliver genes to cells. The crucial vehicles, or vectors, in the AAVP hybrid retained the properties of their respective parental viruses, which the researchers called a surprising outcome.

"This is only a proof-of-concept, and although we have yet to translate these hybrid viruses for use in humans, we hope that this new system will have future clinical applications," says Wadih Arap, M.D.,
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Source:University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center