The cancer killing virus

In recent years, the use of virus to eradicate cancer have received a certain measure of success. The use of attenuated viruses with reduced virulence have been shown to be efficacious in certain form of cancers. The concept is simple. Allow the virus to reach the tumors, and the former will replicate within the latter, killing it. I have given this topic a long thought and I thought if it would be possible to infect the cancer cells, and then bring in the immune system to deal with the cancer cells, which were our normal cells gone awry, as though they were infected cells. It would be a combination of two hits on the cancer cells, with the viruses killing and lysing them, and the immune cells killing them too. Such recombinant viruses would have to express genes that are able to mobilize the immune system like the Monocyte Chemotactic Protein-1(MCP-1) and Interleukin-12 (IL-12), which can recruit and activate cellular components of our immune system like Natural Killer Cells, CD8 T cells, etc (Allavena et al, 1994). Under these inflammatory conditions, the Treg cells functions which downregulates immune response will be over-written. Thus, the first steps would be to sneak the virus into the tumour mass and infect the tumour cells, and subsequently, the tumour cells would be lysed by the viruses themselves and the chemokines and cytokines expressed by the tumours would recruit the immune system to kill the tumour mass. The immune system is seen something as a clean-up agent, which also wipes out any trace of the virus, which may persist in the body. However, in scenarios where the tumour cells express pro-apoptotic proteins like the FAS ligands in a mechanism known as the FAS counterattack, which induces apoptosis of immune cells, the efficacy of such a using such a recombinant virus might be reduced, and the reliance would be on the virus to replicate and kill off the tumour cells. However, in certain types of cancer like brain tumour and colorectal carcinoma, there is over-expression of the CD155 (Masson et al, 2001). CD155 can ligate the activating receptor of Natural Killer Cells and induce killing by the latter (Castriconi et al, 2004). Such a proposition makes the idea of recruiting our immune system to target the cancer cells' weakness(overexpressing CD 155) attractive.

Citations
1) Allavena P,Bianchi G,Zhou D,van Damme J,Jilek P,Sozzani S,Mantovani A. Induction of natural killer cell migration by monocyte chemotactic protein-1, -2 and -3.Eur J Immunol. 1994 Dec;24(12):3233-6.

2) Mavoungou E. Interactions between natural killer cells, cortisol and prolactin in malaria during pregnancy. Clin Med Res. 2006 Mar;4(1):33-41

3) Masson D, Jarry A, Baury B, Blanchardie P, Laboisse C, Lustenberger P, Denis MG. Overexpression of the CD155 in human colorectal carcinoma. Gut. 2001 Aug;49(2):236-40.

4) Castriconi R, Dondero A, Corrias MV, Lanino E, Pende D, Moretta L, Bottino C, Moretta A. Natural killer cell-mediated killing of freshly isolated neuroblastoma cells: critical role of DNAX accessory molecule-1-poliovirus receptor interaction. Cancer Res. 2004 Dec 15;64(24):9180-4.