Using a deadly virus to kill Cancer

The virus, called Lassa, is the cause of a particularly nasty hemorrhagic fever endemic to West Africa. The research sounds terrifying, but a team from Yale and Harvard universities is using part of Lassa’s genetic code to make another virus safe enough to inject into the human brain, where it will hunt down and kill cancer cells. Lassa’s partner in this search-and-destroy mission is vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV. Most people who contract it never get sick, and those who do usually have only flulike symptoms. But if it infects the brain, VSV becomes deadly. Ironically, it’s the more fearsome Lassa that makes the usually innocuous VSV safe for use in that delicate organ.
The Lassa-VSV virus is a chimera, an organism that’s created by combining the genomes of two different organisms to make something new. It kills brain tumors without damaging healthy neurons, apparently because it can bind with normal cells but doesn’t actually infect them.When researchers implanted two tumors into mouse brains, one in each hemisphere, and then injected the mice with Lassa-VSV, the virus infected and killed one tumor, then diffused through the brain to attack the second one without infecting brain cells along the way.