When
you think of a virus, typically a cold or flu comes to mind.
Viruses
are all around us and chances are the last time you ate your veggies, you ate a
virus too.
Inside
the Biomedical Engineering building at Case Western Reserve University Dr. Nicole
Steinmetz and her team are taking the virus that attacks your greens and
turning it into a cancer fighting time bomb.
She
figured out a way to use a plant virus as a medicine container.
Open it
up, put cancer fighting medicine inside, give it directions to attach to a type
of cancer cell and let it go to work.
These
are nanoparticles 2,000 times smaller than the width of the human hair.
"We've
already shown that we can deliver these to brain tumors, breast tumors, colon
cancer and prostate cancer," Dr. Steinmetz says.
When it
comes to cancer treatment, nobody likes a needle or taking pills, so Dr.
Steinmetz's students are also researching a way to put the virus back into its
natural element, like salad greens and patients could eat their medicine for
dinner.
"Plant
viruses can be regarded as safe from a human health perspective they are
naturally in the food chain so we've eaten plant viruses before," Dr.
Steinmetz says.
But
there's a big difference between eating some in your food and injecting a large
amount container a cancer fighting medicine.
"We
still need to evaluate potential side effects. They go to the tumor but where
else do they go?" Dr. Steinmetz says.
The research is being done in mice right now and is showing potential,
but it may take several years before it's ready for human trials.
