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0:00
My
name is Leonard Seymour.
I'm professor of gene therapy
at the University of Oxford.
And I'm going to talk to
you today about gene therapy
and virotherapy for the
treatment of cancer.
And I'll tell you where I think
we are with this field, what are
the main aspects of the field
which have been important,
and what we can
expect from the field.
0:19
So in terms of the lecture, I'll
speak briefly about the background
of cancer to give some
introduction to what I think
are the important
contexts and why gene
therapy and virotherapy
are useful treatments.
I'll talk about cancer gene therapy.
Specifically I'll
mention the challenge
of delivering DNA and
viruses to tumors.
And I'll talk about some of
the approaches which have been
employed using p53
replacement and TNF.
But mainly I'm going to talk
about the use of virotherapy, what
it is, why it's good, how it works.
And I'll give some examples
of the sorts of treatments
which are being developed
and where they are clinically
and where we're
expecting them to go.
0:58
So if I might start talking
about the hallmarks of cancer,
this is a concept that
has been developed
over the last several years
as being the features that
distinguish tumor cells
from normal cells.
Hanahan and Weinberg put
together the exposition of this.
And they've developed
it again recently.
And there are now about 10
different hallmarks of cancer.
These are features which tumors and
tumor cells develop which make them
distinct from normal cells and gives
us an opportunity for intervention.
So for example, they
evade apoptosis.
They are self-sufficient in
maintaining their growth.
They tend to be insensitive to
signals that turn off growth.
They grow limitlessly.
Many other aspects, several of
which are exploited in chemotherapy.
But increasingly, many
of which are being
developed in the
field of virotherapy.
So I will pick up on several of
these different features of tumors
as ways that we can develop viruses
that will selectively treat tumors.
