PROJECT TITLE: Towards a new therapy against childhood brain cancer: How does the Zika virus kill aggressive brain tumour cells?
LEAD INVESTIGATOR: Dr Rob Ewing
INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
AMOUNT AWARDED: Approx £35,000 (funded by The Little Princess Trust in partnership with CCLG)
Proteins in our cells work together to carry out all the functions required for life. My research team at the University of Southampton studies the interactions between proteins in cancer cells, which allows us to understand which proteins drive the formation of cancers and how they contribute to cancer severity.
Several years ago, we were working with Professor Keith Okamoto and his research team in Brazil to understand how stem cells contribute to childhood brain cancer. At the time, there was an epidemic of the Zika virus in Brazil, and Professor Okamoto and his team discovered that brain cancer cells could be infected and rapidly killed by the virus.
This finding was incredibly exciting and got us all thinking about how the Zika virus might be doing this, and whether we could use it to treat childhood brain cancer.
The first steps
We started by asking two questions:
- Which genes are affected when the Zika virus infects brain tumour cells?
- Which of the proteins within brain tumour cells interact with the Zika virus’s proteins?
With the answers to these questions, Professor Okamoto and I aim to work out the precise way in which the virus kills the cancer cells. This will help us establish whether the Zika virus could be used as a brain cancer therapy. We also hope that understanding more about how the Zika virus attacks brain cancer will highlight cancer cell processes that can be targeted with existing medications.
Some of our results so far
Working together, the research teams have identified several ways in which the virus manipulates in brain cancer cells and are currently investigating these further.
We found that the response of brain cancer cells is very different from the response of normal brain cells to a Zika virus infection. This is a really important finding, and we are working to explore this difference so that we can make sure any future Zika-based therapy is safe by ensuring it only targets brain cancer cells.
What will this research achieve?
This research is just beginning, and it will take some time for all our work to bear fruit in the clinic. However, we strongly believe that our collaborative work will contribute to a Zika-based therapy progressing into clinical trials within the next three to five years Our recent work has also highlighted that the Zika virus can infect and kill neuroblastoma cells and having a therapy such as Zika which we could use against both brain cancer and neuroblastoma would be a real game-changer for treatment of childhood cancer.
Wider research into using viruses to infect and kill cancer cells is happening a lot at the moment, which we hope will help accelerate our own progress on Zika-based therapies. In the wider childhood cancer community, there is a stark contrast between the treatment and survival of children in high-income countries, such as the UK, and low-middle-income countries, such as Brazil. By working closely with the expert Brazilian team on this project, we are helping to bridge this gap and improve treatment of children with cancer in poorer countries.
What’s next?
We are now working to bring our Zika virus research in neuroblastoma up to speed and in-line with our brain tumour research. This will be a focus for us moving forward as we believe that analysing these cancer types alongside each other will yield the best outcome for childhood cancer patients worldwide.
From Contact magazine issue 97 - Winter 2022
