Researchers create artificial designer viruses to help fight cancer

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New Delhi: Researchers have created artificial designer viruses that can help combat cancer cells.

These designer viruses alert the immune system and cause it to send killer cells to help fight the tumour, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

Most cancer cells only provoke a limited reaction from the immune system -- the body's defence mechanism -- and can thus grow without appreciable resistance.

By contrast, viral infections cause the body to release alarm signals, stimulating the immune system to use all available means to fight the invader.

Immunotherapies have been successfully used to treat cancer for many years; they "disinhibit" the body's defence system and so also strengthen its half-hearted fight against cancer cells.

Stimulating the immune system to specifically and wholeheartedly combat cancer cells, however, has remained a distant goal.

The innovative designer viruses, manufactured by Swiss scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University of Basel, could do exactly that.

(With IANS inputs)