Word: viruses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...digital camera? MP3 player? Digital camcorder? Then you probably have many digital goodies to preserve. It's risky to keep them solely on your computer's hard drive-catch a bad virus and you could lose the whole lot. You should back them up. One way to do it is to copy all those photos, songs and videos to an external hard drive...
Other bug-based therapies for cancer take advantage of the body's natural response to invaders. To this end, scientists at the Texas Medical Center have enlisted the aid of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). More than 95% of the population is infected with EBV, a usually benign microbe that sequesters itself in the immune system's B cells. Like any other cellbound virus, EBV doesn't remain dormant for long, dividing furiously and emerging in runaway viral mobs. But unlike most other viruses, EBV is quickly eliminated by the vigilant immune system's killer T cells...
...cells with proteins specific to certain cancers, they could grow killer T cells in the lab that are trained to fight those specialized B cells. The T cells would then be able to find and destroy malignant cells as if they were just another cell infected with a virus...
...such as eggs. Once in the blood, its surface coat can trigger septic shock, a hyperaggressive immune response that can lead to liver and kidney failure and a dangerous drop in blood pressure. Confined to a tumor, however, the bacterium could be a potent cancer killer. Like the measles virus, salmonella zeroes in naturally on tumor cells. "If an animal has a tumor, that tumor is salmonella's favorite place to go," says David Bermudes, director of microbiology at Vion. With a simple change in the bacterium's genome, the Vion team and Yale scientists were able to give salmonella...
...microbes if the bad-bug approach turns out to be as successful as early trials suggest. Like AIDS cocktails and cancer chemotherapies, microbe-based therapies may require a multidrug approach. For example, combining the modified clostridium bacterium, which attacks a tumor at its anaerobic core, with the altered measles virus, which destroys the periphery of the tumor, could be a potent new way to fight cancer. Add some radiation or chemotherapy to mop up any lingering cancer cells, and doctors could find themselves closing in on a cure...