As October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, I thought it would be really fitting to have a blog post on breast cancer. It turns out that Penn State could have a HUGE part with finding a cure.

Each breast cancer tumor is different- some have protein receptors for estrogen and others have receptors for progesterone. These hormones act as signal for the tumors to grow more.  In order to counteract this, hormone therapy is used which can lower or block the amount of hormones reaching the tumor. This slows down and can potentially stop tumor growth. This becomes really problematic though for those who have Hormone-Receptive-Negative breast cancer tumors. These tumors do not have hormone receptors, but this is where Dr. Craig Meyers comes in. Dr. Meyers works as a professor of microbiology and immunology at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA.
In 2011 an article was released by Penn Live about Dr. Meyers and his discovery of a virus that can deplete triple negative breast cancer tumors in mice (aka the Hormone-Receptive-Negative tumors). The virus that he has discovered how to kill cancer cells is called AAV2. AAV2 is not known cause any type of disease within humans and animals which is why it was such a surprise to find that it was able to kill cancer cells. In 2011 this idea was still going through FDA approval and in the process of completing the first step of the process- preclinical animal testing. In 2014 an article by Scicasts was written about Dr. Meyers discovery and it said that this idea was still going through preclinical animal testing. However instead of focusing on just breast cancer cells in mice, they were going to test cancer cells throughout each mouses body as it “would better model what happens in humans”.

This is a breakthrough technique because as Dr. Meyers says, “Treatment of breast cancer remains difficult because there are multiple signaling pathways that promote tumor growth and develop resistance to treatment”. The cancer cells are completely killed for the AAV2 virus by “activating a protein called caspases, which are essential to the natural death of a cell”. Not only does the AAV2 virus kill these really aggressive cancer cells, it also slows down their growth which makes it even easier to wipe the tumors out.

After Andrew’s lecture on science and his allusion of science to Mt. Everest, I have a good idea of how long/difficult it will be to get this past the first preclinical stage. Once it gets past that stage though, I think that many patients would be willing to participate in the trial- one in three diagnoses of breast cancer are hormone-receptive-negative. As Andrew also taught us, cancer trials are ethical because there is a 50-50 chance of the treatment being good vs harmful. Hopefully this treatment will get past the first stage of preclinical treatment so that some human trials can occur. It would be very easy to hold a double blind control trial, the infection is injected right into the tumors and because there are no side affects (illness wise) neither the doctor nor patient would know which treatment the patient is receiving. It will be really interesting to see where this treatment goes- hopefully it is the answer to breast cancer!