Cancer is one of the major problems of the 21st century. Millions of people obtain this disorder every year, but there is still no successful treatment. The reason of incurability of cancer is existence of various types of cancer caused by different mutations and abnormalities as well as inability to provide target treatment with the usage of modern methods, like liposomes. Both methods of treatment that are used nowadays, like chemotherapy, don’t differentiate between cancer and normal cells, and therefore, a variety of complications result from such treatment.
But there is one common feature of all cancer cells: they are able to reproduce continuously. That feature is advantageous for using viruses as tumor-suppressors, because viruses prefer cells that reproduce fast. Virus therapy is becoming a popular trend in the modern researches and medicine. Viruses have already proved themselves to be useful in some cases of gene therapy and many researches continue in the field of cancer treatment. That’s why I chose the topic of the article that is close to cancer treatment by viruses. The article I chose for my summary was written by Ayush Midha and it was called “Using a Virus to Treat Cancer”.
Three recent viral models to cure cancer are discussed in the article. It is stated that cancer cells lack a protein that is present in normal cells – p53. Viral agents are modified in such a way that they recognize these cells and kill them. There are agents that are so much effective that they don’t require any additional chemotherapy appliance and don’t exhibit side effects. In my opinion these viral models represent a new step in the cancer treatment, but these methods of treatment should be accurately tested on laboratory animals before being introduced to people.
It was stated in the article that a virus is a biological system with a high level of mutations. Thus, we can’t completely evaluate the possible risks of its usage. I agree with this statement and
I think that the viruses that are not pathogenic should be taken for such purposes. They should just be modified in order to detect cancer cells and any possibility to make damage to normal cells should be avoided.
In order to regulate the experiments concerning with cancer treatment by viruses, specific legislation is created. Most of the researches are conducted outside the USA, in China for example. I think that more confidence should be paid to the researches and these tendencies should be applied to all the countries. Cancer is the world-spread problem, thus the efforts of all the countries should be applied to solve it.
To make a conclusion, viral-based treatment of cancer is an effective method. It can help people to easily overcome any type of cancer. But it still requires researches to make this method more effective and reduce its possible side-effects. More complex researches will help to deal with some moral and ethical issues caused by using viruses as therapeutic agents and will compete with such methods as chemotherapy. So, viruses are …