• Question: There are rumours that the COVID-19 virus was modified to affect the elder and people with a weak immune sistem. Could this be used to create some type of good virus to enter for example cancer cells and destroy them?

    Asked by anon-256665 on 12 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Amy Mason

      Amy Mason answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      I’m not an expert in COVID-19 or genetic manipulation. But from all the talks/papers I’ve seen on it, there is no indication that COVID-19 was modified by anything other than standard evolution.
      Diseases often hit the elderly and immunocompromised harder than healthy younger adults. This is because their bodies are less able to fight off infections. The same thing happens with the yearly flu season as well.

      Good viruses are already used to target cancer cells – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolytic_virus

    • Photo: Alex Holmes

      Alex Holmes answered on 12 Jun 2020:

      Hi Alex!

      Like I said to your other question, there’s a lot of evidence showing that this virus wasn’t modified or made in a lab, but let’s chat about viruses and cancer!!

      There’s something called immunotherapy – which is where viruses can be used to “jumpstart” someone’s immune system to get it to fight the cancer!

      This was first done in 1891 by someone called William B Coley, he basically gave someone with cancer a bacterial infection ON PURPOSE (a big no-no in ethics unless you know it’s for sure going to help). and guess what? it completely got rid of the patient’s tumours – including a huge one on his neck that was stopping the patient from being able to eat.

      He then made a treatment for cancers – a mix of bacteria he’d give to patients to treat the cancer. However, radiotherapy and chemotherapy soon came along to steal his thunder. After he died, his daughter found and put together all of his research and published it for the scientific community to know that this treatment was still an option.

      So how on earth does making someone sick with a virus or bacteria help with cancer?

      Well first things first, the immune system usually ignores our normal cells, or else it’ll cause an autoimmune disease. When you get ill, your cells basically start displaying parts of the bacteria or virus on their surfaces – like waving flags to the immune system saying “hi this thing is in me please come help” and the immune system can come over and recognise these bacteria and virus parts and know to help.

      Now cancer is sneaky, because cancer is someone’s own cells gone wrong they can look just like normal cells to the immune system, or if the cells do wave about cancer parts for the immune system to see, the cancer is also sending out messages to the immune system saying “nothing to see here, move along”. The immune system weighs up these signals and usually moves along.

      Now this is where the virus or bacteria infection comes in. What if in addition to waving around cancer bits, the cells were also waving around bacteria bits? Surely the immune system would find that harder to ignore! Now what if we could also stop the cancer from sending out “nothing to see here” messages? The immune system definitely can’t ignore it.

      This is still in it’s earlyish stages and a lot of people in my old department are working on it, but it looks like it could be really promising!! I know it’s not exactly the question you asked, but hopefully you found it interesting anyway!

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