Sub-Journal of "Nature": Two "killer" viruses and cancer cells that threaten human health, who will die when the two meet?

Oncolytic virus is a kind of tumor-killing virus with replication ability.

At the beginning of the 20th century, The Lancet magazine reported that a woman with chronic leukemia showed signs of a decrease in the number of diseased white blood cells and improvement of her condition after an influenza virus infection, which attracted the attention of the scientific community

However, the birth of this "anti-tumor sword" was not smooth.

However, oncolytic virus therapy also has its shortcomings.

Recently, researchers from the German Cancer Research Center and the oncolytic virus immunotherapy laboratory jointly published an article entitled Oncolytic H-1 parvovirus binds to sialic acid on laminins for cell attachment and entry in the journal Nature Communications.

In order to use oncolytic viruses more effectively and find biomarkers that help identify H-1PV susceptibility, the research team analyzed the protein genes located on the surface of cancer cells to characterize their role in the process of docking with the virus

A regulator "Laminin γ1" (LAMC1) that plays a key role in mediating cell attachment and penetration is locked.

In further research, researchers evaluated the clinical significance of this new discovery

In addition, in brain tumors, its expression will increase with the increase of tumor grade, and the level of laminin in tumors of patients with advanced GBM is higher

However, it is gratifying that although the increased expression of laminin is associated with the prognosis and poor survival of a variety of tumor patients, it can make tumors more susceptible to infection and destruction, that is to say, the high expression of laminin Cancer patients are more likely to respond to oncolytic virus therapy

Therefore, in the future, we can use laminin as a biomarker to classify cancer patients based on its expression level in order to predict the sensitivity and responsiveness of different types of cancer to H-1PV-based anti-cancer therapies