health science 40

Multiple myeloma is a cancer of plasma B cells, a cell type within the body's immune system. MM is the second most common blood cancer and, unfortunately, remains difficult to treat. Even with the introduction of new chemotherapy  regimens, most patients still succumb to disease relapse either from reinfusion of cancerous cells during stem cell transplant or expansion of drug-resistant disease after chemotherapy In the recent study, Eric C. Bartee, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Microbiology and Immunology at MUSC, and his colleagues at MUSC and the University of Oslo took a novel approach to treating MM: using viral oncolytics to specifically target and destroy cancer cells. "What I thought was really interesting here was that we could actually get rid of disease and it didn't appear to ever come back," said Bartee. For the past several years, Bartee has been using myxoma virus to treat MM in cell culture. MYXV exclusively infects rabbits and is therefore n...

The regrowth of cancer stem cells is responsible for the drug resistance that develops in many breast tumors and the reason that for many patients, the benefits of chemo are short-lived. Cancer recurrence after chemotherapy is frequently fatal. "Breast cancer stem cells pose a serious problem for therapy," says lead study investigator Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Medicine, director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. "These are the cells that can break away from a tumor and metastasize; these are the cells you most want to kill with chemotherapy. Paradoxically, though, cancer stem cells are quite resistant to chemotherapy." Semenza says previous studies have shown that resistance to chemotherapy arises from the hardy nature of cancer stem cells, which are often found in the centers of tumors, where oxygen levels are quite...