Minnesota – The Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics has announced its 2008 research projects, including a new experimental program involving virotherapy for the treatment of mesothelioma.

The research partnership involves the Mayor Clinic, the University of Minnesota, and the state of Minnesota. The partnership’s laboratory headquarters is located in Rochester on the Mayo Clinic campus. Working collaboratively, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota focus on research projects that neither group would be able to accomplish separately, in an attempt to increase the pace of potentially useful research.

Eric Wieben, Partnership program director at Mayo, said in a statement from the partnership, “We’re beginning to explore ways to use biotechnology and nanotechnology to do analysis and to make Minnesota’s environment healthier by avoiding toxic chemicals in pest control.”

Among the partnership’s new research projects are those exploring epilepsy, new pesticides that are non-toxic for humans, gene therapy for the treatment of heart disease, breast cancer diagnosis technology, fungal infection treatments, and mesothelioma research.

Noting that taconite miners in northeast Minnesota have a substantially higher risk of developing mesothelioma, the research group has decided to allot $867,114 and two years to study the potential of a type of treatment called virotherapy.

The research will be led by Dr. Stephen Russell of the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Robert Krattzke of the University of Minnesota. The goal of the research project is to use a genetically altered measles virus developed at the Mayo Clinic to target mesothelioma.

Mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer that is particularly difficult to treat. Conventional treatments don’t tend to greatly improve a patient’s prognosis, and more than half of people diagnosed with the cancer die within two or three years.

Virotherapy is still a largely experimental type of cancer treatment, but it has shown promising results in treating certain types of cancer.

The therapy uses biotechnology techniques to convert viruses into diseases that attack only cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

Virotherapy is a new technology, but the idea isn’t new—scientists noticed as early as the 1950s that cancer patients who had a viral infection, or who had recently been vaccinated, sometimes showed improvement. This discovery was largely attributed to the fact that viral infections cause the immune system to generate cytokines called tumor necrosis factor and interferon, both of which sometimes have mild anti-cancer effects.

The viruses used in virotherapy are somewhat different in that they are genetically altered specifically to target and kill cancer cells, but the therapy has been shown to have similar results. In 2006, researchers succeeding in using an avian virus to target cancer cells in people with a type of brain tumor, and achieved some encouraging results.

Virotherapy may be particularly promising for the treatment of cancers where surgery is not likely to be effective, which is often the case for people with mesothelioma. Virotherapy can be administered via an injection, just like chemotherapy, and doesn’t involve removing tumors, meaning that a patient who isn’t a good candidate for surgery may still be a suitable candidate for virotherapy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Mesothelioma Treatment, Minnesota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.