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Reported by Tiffany Chao, M.D.

CHICAGO - A new form of breast cancer treatment may be smallpox?

What was once a feared killer of millions of people may someday be used to treat one of the most dangerous forms of breast cancer. So far it's worked in mice, and researchers are encouraged.

The researchers, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, have found that a vaccine made from a virus from the smallpox family can be used in the treatment of a certain type of breast cancer, called triple-negative breast cancer or TNBC.

This form of breast cancer is especially difficult to treat because it is not sensitive to the special hormonal and immune therapies that many other forms of breast cancer are. These tumors can be often be treated with some chemotherapy, but they tend to be more aggressive and recur more often.

"We still don't have an understanding as to why this cancer is so aggressive and tends to recur after treatment," said Dr. Sepideh Gholami, the lead study author and a surgical resident at Stanford University Medical Center. "One of the reasons I wanted to focus on TNBC is that there aren't many long-term treatment options."

It is estimated that about 10 to 20 percent of all breast cancer cases are triple-negative. It is particularly prevalent in women under the age of 35.

Study findings presented today at the 2012 Annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons showed that the new vaccinia virus, called GLV-1h164, was able to enter cells and cause destruction of the tumor, as well as prevent blood vessel growth in the tumors in mouse animal models, resulting in significant tumor destruction.

Since smallpox vaccines have been given to billions of people to eradicate smallpox, this new vaccine will likely have a similar level of safety. However, its use as a therapy in patients with triple negative breast cancer would require a clinical trial to evaluate its effectiveness.

Original post:
Smallpox Virus May Help Treat Deadly Form of Breast Cancer

By MARIA CHENG AP Medical Writer

LONDON (AP) - Britain's Health Protection Agency has published an early genetic sequence of the new respiratory virus related to SARS that shows it is most closely linked to bat viruses, and scientists say camels, sheep or goats might end up being implicated too.

So far, officials have only identified two confirmed cases and say the virus isn't as infectious as SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed hundreds of people, mostly in Asia, in a 2003 global outbreak.

In Geneva, World Health Organization spokesman Glenn Thomas told reporters Friday that so far the signs are that the virus is "not easily transmitted from person to person" - but analyses are ongoing. The agency said it's too early to tell how big a threat the new virus will be since it is unknown how exactly it spreads and whether it will evolve into a more dangerous form.

Global health officials suspect two victims from the Middle East may have caught it from animals.

"It's a logical possibility to consider any animals present in the region in large numbers," said Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Biologists now need to go into the area and take samples from any animals they can get their hands on, including camels and goats," he said. Baric said it was crucial to find out how widespread the virus is in animals and what kind of contact might be risky for people.

Baric suggested bats might be spreading the virus directly to humans since the two confirmed infections happened months apart. "If there was an established transmission pattern from other animals, we probably would have seen a lot more cases," he said.

WHO said it is considering the possibility the new coronavirus sickened humans after direct contact with animals. The agency is now working with experts in the Middle East to figure out how the two confirmed cases got infected but could not share details until the investigation was finished.

One patient was a Saudi Arabian man who died several months ago while the other is a Qatari national who traveled to Saudi Arabia before falling ill and is currently in critical but stable condition in a London hospital.

Earlier this week, WHO issued a global alert asking doctors to be on guard for any potential cases of the new respiratory virus, which also causes kidney failure.

Read more:
Animals suspected in spread of new virus

Published: Friday, September 28, 2012, 12:01 a.m.

Most of the bat strains do not infect people. Why the new strain does -- and how it got into two unrelated people from the same part of the world months apart -- is a mystery being urgently investigated by scientists in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The new bug is a coronavirus, a family that includes the agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which caused more than 8,000 infections and 900 deaths in 2003. The SARS coronavirus is also carried by bats.

"It is perplexing. But it is the very early days," said Nick Phin, an epidemiologist at the British government's Health Protection Agency who is helping investigate the case of the Qatari patient, who is in an intensive care unit of a London hospital.

The goal is to determine as quickly as possible whether the new virus is a threat to public health or a one-off event that in less vigilant times might have been missed entirely. So far there is no evidence of other, unexplained cases of severe pneumonia with kidney failure, which are the hallmarks of the two cases.

"We should keep our feet on the ground. Two birds don't make a summer and two patients don't make an outbreak," said Ron A.M. Fouchier, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. Fouchier determined the gene sequence of the new virus and posted it for other investigators to see and use.

With no sign that the virus is transmitted from person-to-person or is easily picked up from animals, the advice to the public "has to be go about your normal business," Phin said.

Fouchier's laboratory isolated the new coronavirus from lung tissue from a 60-year-old Saudi man who was admitted to a hospital in Jiddah on June 13 and died June 24.

The Qatari patient became ill on Sept. 3 and was hospitalized in Doha a few days later. On Sept. 11, he was sent by air ambulance to England. There, a coronavirus was isolated from lung fluid and partially sequenced.

The Qatari man had recently visited Saudi Arabia. But he returned home more than 10 days before he became ill, according to a report by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm. Because the incubation period for coronavirus infections is about a week, that suggests he acquired the virus in Qatar, not Saudi Arabia.

Originally posted here:
Mystery killer virus linked to bats

Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

See original here:
New virus in Africa looks like rabies, acts like Ebola

Frederick A. Murphy / CDC handout via EPA file

A new virus that appears similar to rabies, but has the symptoms and lethality of Ebola, shown here, has been dubbed the Bas-Congo virus. It killed two teenagers in the Congo in 2009.

By Maggie Fox, NBC News

A virus that killed two teenagers in Congo in 2009 is a completely new type, related to rabies but causing the bleeding and rapid death that makes Ebola infection so terrifying, scientists reported on Thursday. Theyre searching for the source of the virus, which may be transmitted by insects or bats.

The new virus is being named Bas-Congo virus, for the area where it was found. Researchers are finding more and more of these new viruses, in part because new tests make it possible, but also in the hope of better understanding them so they can prevent pandemics of deadly disease.

The virus infected a 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl in the same village in Congo in 2009. They didnt stand a chance, says Joseph Fair of Metabiota, a company that investigates pathogens. Fair is in the Democratic Republic of Congo now, under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak.

They expired within three days, Fair said in a telephone interview. It was a very rapid killer.

A few days later a male nurse who cared for the two teenagers developed the same symptoms and survived. Samples from the lucky nurse have been tested and it turned out a completely new virus had infected him, Fair and other researchers report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS pathogens.

The genetic sequences went to Dr. Charles Chiu, of the University of California, San Francisco.

We were astounded that this patient had sequences in his blood from a completely unknown and unidentified virus, Chiu said. They werent expecting that.

Read more:
Dangerous new virus in Africa