Poliovirus treatment helped patients with deadly brain

tumors live longer

A modified form of the virus increased survival in some people with glioblastoma
BY
AIMEE CUNNINGHAM
5:50PM, JUNE 26, 2018

Few treatment options are available to people facing a second battle with a particularly fatal type of brain tumor called
glioblastoma. But dosing the tumor with a genetically modified poliovirus — one that doesn’t cause the eponymous,
devastating disease — may give these patients more time, a small clinical study suggests.

Of 61 people with recurring glioblastoma who were treated with the modified virus, 21 percent were alive after three years. In
a “historical” comparison group of 104 patients, who would have been eligible for the treatment but died before it was
available, 4 percent lived as long, researchers report online June 26 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Two patients who received the altered virus are still alive today, six years after treatment. “They’ve been able to lead largely
normal lives, and we almost never see that with these brain tumors,” says neuro-oncologist and study coauthor Darell Bigner of
Duke University Medical Center.

The standard treatment for glioblastoma is surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, but the cancer often recurs, Bigner says.
Usually patients do not survive longer than 20 months after being diagnosed; those with a recurrence typically live less than a
year.

Poliovirus, which can cause paralysis and death, infects nerve cells through a cell surface protein that also shows up on tumor
cells, including in glioblastoma. In previous work, the Duke research team swapped out the genetic machinery that allows the
virus to commandeer and destroy nerve cells with a part from human rhinovirus, the common cold culprit. But this change did
not prevent the poliovirus from killing tumor cells. The treatment also triggers the immune system to target the brain tumors.

In the new study, the team delivered a single dose of the virus to patients, infused over 6.5 hours through a small tube
traversing the skull and directly into the tumor. None of the patients who received the revamped virus developed symptoms
related to polio.

Both people who have survived for six years developed glioblastoma again, but were successfully treated a second time with
the altered poliovirus. “There doesn’t seem to be any resistance to re-treatment,” Bigner says.

Bigner and colleagues plan to study the effects of combining the poliovirus treatment with other drugs, such as checkpoint
inhibitors, which may further boost the immune response against the brain tumors.

There have been a few other studies using different viruses to target glioblastoma in recent years. These approaches have also
benefitted small numbers of patients, says neurosurgical oncologist E. Antonio Chiocca of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston, who was not involved in the new research.

“We must be optimistic, but with caution,” Chiocca says. “The history of glioblastoma treatments is littered with lots of
early clinical trials that appear to show very promising and encouraging results,” which did not prove to be meaningful in later
trials.
Here’s how drinking coffee could protect your heart
In mice, caffeine boosts cells’ energy and that helps repair damage
BY
TINA HESMAN SAEY
2:00PM, JUNE 21, 2018

CUPSA JOE Studies have shown that people who drink four cups of coffee a day have a lower risk of dying of a
heart attack. A new study in mice may show one reason for that; caffeine in coffee gives cells energy to fight off
damage.

Coffee revs up cell’s energy factories and helps hearts recover from heart attacks, a study of
mice suggests.

In the study, researchers gave mice the equivalent of four cups of coffee a day for 10 days
before inducing heart attacks in the rodents. Cells in mice that got caffeine repaired the heart
attack damage better than cells in mice that didn’t get caffeine, researchers report June 21
in PLOS Biology. Caffeine helps move a protein called p27 into mitochondria, the organelles that
produce energy for cells. Increasing p27 in mitochondria upped the organelle’s energy
production, and that helped heart cells recover from damage, a team led by researchers from
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany found.

People and other animals also have p27, raising the possibility that caffeine could help heal
people’s hearts, too. Normally, p27 is found in the nucleus of cells, where it helps control when
cells divide. Its energy-boosting role in the mitochondria wasn’t known before.

Coffee seems to protect against heart disease, diabetes and other ailments, except cancer (SN:
10/3/15, p. 16). The new discovery may help explain why, says biochemist Judith Haendeler of
the university’s medical faculty.

“The old doctors’ warning that coffee isn’t good for people with heart disease, that’s out for us,
based on what we found,” says molecular geneticist Joachim Altschmied. But Haendeler
cautions that just upping coffee consumption without doing other heart-friendly activities such
as exercising and eating right probably won’t do people much good. She further warns that
drinking too much coffee or green tea may drive too much p27 into mitochondria and destroy
them, causing health problems.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-drinking-coffee-could-protect-your-heart?tgt=nr
Diamonds and more suggest unusual origins for asteroids

Inside a space rock, scientists found unusual diamonds. They hint that rock formed inside a long-lost planet.
DOTTEDHIPPO/ISTOCKPHOTO
A space rock that fell to Earth a decade ago may once have been part of a planet. It would have been a planet that met its end in the solar
system’s early days, new data indicate. Inside this meteorite, scientists found tiny pockets of iron and sulfur. They were wrapped in diamonds.
Those crystal gems formed under high pressure, the researchers say — likely inside a planet the size of Mercury or Mars

There’s also a second newfound space oddity. Scientists have been studying a renegade asteroid that travels in a strange direction. They now
report that this space rock appears to have been born somewhere outside our solar system.

The new observations come from a pair of new papers.

Let’s start with the gem-studded meteorite. It's parent no longer exists. It likely would have been a protoplanet — a moon- to Mars-sized
celestial “embryo” that could have helped build a true planet through a series of energetic collisions. But in that process, the meteorite’s parent
appears to have been smashed to smithereens. It would have been long ago — in those violent early days of our solar system’s formation.

“We probably have in our hands a piece of one of these first planets that have disappeared,” says Philippe Gillet. He’s a geophysicist in
Switzerland who works at a research institute and university. It’s known as EPFL. That’s short for École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne.

Along with his colleagues, including EPFL physicist Farhang Nabiei, Gillet analyzed tiny rock fragments. The pieces came from the Almahata Sitta
meteorites. These meteorites are famous because they are parts of the first asteroid that scientists tracked all the way from space to their
crash-landing on Earth. This asteroid streaked across the Nubian desert in Sudan in 2008.

Almahata Sitta meteorites are a type called ureilites (Yu-ree-AY-leits). Their makeup differs from any of the known stony planets in our solar
system. Inside these ureilites are very small diamonds.

Story continues below image.

Diamonds are crystals made of pure carbon. They can form from a powerful collision. Or they can form in a dense environment where
pressures are very high, such as inside a space rock. The width of diamonds inside the meteorites was only about 100 micrometers (about four
thousandths of an inch). But that still made them too large to have been formed by two ordinary asteroids colliding. Such diamonds could form,
however, inside very large asteroids. If the asteroid was at least 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) wide, the pressure inside it could be high enough
to squeeze carbon into diamonds.

Also odd

The researchers discovered another strange thing. It made them question whether the gems came from an asteroid at all. The diamonds had
grown around even smaller crystals of iron and sulfur. Normally iron and sulfur would repel each other like oil and water, says Cécile Hébert.
She’s another physicist at EPFL.

In this zoomed-in image of a meteorite, the blue area is diamond. Tiny pockets of sulfur and iron (yellow) inside the diamond suggest the
meteorite came from a long-lost planet. The gray part is graphite, a type of carbon that wasn’t compressed as much as the diamond.

F. NABIEI, E. OVEISI,C. HÉBERT/EPFL, SWITZERLAND

It must have taken enormous pressure to make those crystals hold together. You’d need pressure almost 200,000 times higher than what we
feel at sea level on Earth. Where could such an environment exist? “That can only be at the center of a very large planet,” Hébert says. The
planet would have to have been somewhere between the sizes of Mercury and Mars. That would make its diameter about 4,900 to 6,800
kilometers (3,000 to 4,200 miles), Hébert says.

As they were forming, these would have been what are called protoplanets. They likely existed some 4 billion years ago, during the early days of
the solar system. But only a few survived to become the today’s four true rocky planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The rest probably
smashed into each other, breaking apart within the first 100 million years. Scientists have seen this in simulations of the early solar system.

“We are confirming the existence of such former planets,” Gillet says. He and his team shared their new findings April 17 in Nature
Communications.

It isn’t surprising that these planets may have existed, says Meenakshi Wadhwa. She’s a space chemist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
But, she notes, this is the first time a meteorite has held direct evidence for a vanished protoplanet.

Not so fast, says Martin Bizzarro. He’s a space chemist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. A protoplanet is not the only
explanation possible.

"They've done very careful work," Bizzarro says. But more research needs to be done. For example, scientists might test for magnetic fields left
over from the rock’s time inside its planet. That could reveal if the meteorites were once within a large planet's hot, liquid core. Whether the
meteorites really came from a protoplanet is “still an open question,” he concludes.

An immigrant asteroid?

Now for that renegade rock.Known as 2015 BZ509, it shares its orbit with Jupiter. Asteroids in the infant solar system formed from one swirling

cloud. They should therefore travel in the same direction — even now. To find out why one of them doesn’t, astronomers turned to a computer

model. Such computer programs run a lot of complex simulations. These can test many ideas and then home in on the most likely explanation or

prediction of some event.

That modeling showed that the odd asteroid could have been traveling in reverse ever since the solar system’s youth. The best explanation for
why: that this rock migrated from another star’s planetary system. If true, it would be the first asteroid known to do so.

Fathi Namouni of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, and Helena Morais of Universidade Estadual Paulista in Rio Claro, Brazil shared
their analysis May 21. It appears in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
computer program A set of instructions that a computer uses to perform some
analysis or computation. The writing of these instructions is known as computer
Power Words
programming.
(for more about Power Words, click here)

core Something — usually round-shaped — in the center of an object. (in

asteroid A rocky object in orbit around the sun. Most asteroids orbit in a region that
geology) Earth’s innermost layer. Or, a long, tube-like sample drilled down into ice, soil
falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers refer to this region as the
or rock. Cores allow scientists to examine layers of sediment, dissolved chemicals, rock
asteroid belt.
and fossils to see how the environment at one location changed through hundreds to
thousands of years or more.

astronomy The area of science that deals with celestial objects, space and the
physical universe. People who work in this field are called astronomers.
crystal (adj. crystalline) A solid consisting of a symmetrical, ordered, three-
dimensional arrangement of atoms or molecules. It’s the organized structure taken by
most minerals. Apatite, for example, forms six-sided crystals. The mineral crystals that
carbon The chemical element having the atomic number 6. It is the physical basis of make up rock are usually too small to be seen with the unaided eye.
all life on Earth. Carbon exists freely as graphite and diamond. It is an important part of
coal, limestone and petroleum, and is capable of self-bonding, chemically, to form an
enormous number of chemically, biologically and commercially important molecules.
diameter The length of a straight line that runs through the center of a circle or
spherical object, starting at the edge on one side and ending at the edge on the far side.

celestial (in astronomy) Of or relating to the sky, or outer space.

diamond One of the hardest known substances and rarest gems on Earth. Diamonds
form deep within the planet when carbon is compressed under incredibly strong
colleague Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member. pressure.

computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or

simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.
embryo The early stages of a developing organism, or animal with a backbone, sea level The overall level of the ocean over the entire globe when all tides and other
consisting only one or a few cells. As an adjective, the term would be embryonic — and short-term changes are averaged out.
could be used to refer to the early stages or life of a system or technology.

simulation (v. simulate) An analysis, often made using a computer, of some

environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the conditions, functions or appearance of a physical system. A computer program would do
process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather this by using mathematical operations that can describe the system and how it might
and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity change over time or in response to different anticipated situations.
(or even the placement of components in some electronics system or product).

solar system The eight major planets and their moons in orbit around our sun,
geophysics A field of science that applies and focuses on the principles of physics together with smaller bodies in the form of dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids and
(energy and forces) to the study of Earth and to similar structures in other celestial comets.
bodies (such as exoplanets). People who work in this field are known as geophysicists.

star The basic building block from which galaxies are made. Stars develop when
iron A metallic element that is common within minerals in Earth’s crust and in its hot gravity compacts clouds of gas. When they become dense enough to sustain nuclear-
core. This metal also is found in cosmic dust and in many meteorites. fusion reactions, stars will emit light and sometimes other forms of electromagnetic
radiation. The sun is our closest star.

Jupiter (in astronomy) The solar system’s largest planet, it has the shortest day length
(10 hours). A gas giant, its low density indicates that this planet is composed of light
elements, such as hydrogen and helium. This planet also releases more heat than it
receives from the sun as gravity compresses its mass (and slowly shrinks the planet).
sulfur A chemical element with an atomic number of sixteen. Sulfur, one of the most
common elements in the universe, is an essential element for life. Because sulfur and its
compounds can store a lot of energy, it is present in fertilizers and many industrial
chemicals.

magnetic field An area of influence created by certain materials, called magnets, or by

the movement of electric charges.
Mars The fourth planet from the sun, just one planet out from Earth. Like Earth, it has
seasons and moisture. But its diameter is only about half as big as Earth’s.
Mercury (in astronomy) A rocky planet and the one whose orbit is closest to the sun.
(Here, the term is capitalized.)
sun The star at the center of Earth’s solar system. It’s an average size star about
26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Also a term for any sunlike
star.
Venus The second planet out from the sun, it has a rocky core, just as Earth does.
Venus lost most of its water long ago. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation broke apart those
water molecules, allowing their hydrogen atoms to escape into space.

meteorite A lump of rock or metal from space that passes through Earth’s
atmosphere and collides with the ground.

micrometer (sometimes called a micron) One thousandth of a millimeter, or one

millionth of a meter. It’s also equivalent to a few one-hundred-thousandths of an inch.

model A simulation of a real-world event (usually using a computer) that has been
developed to predict one or more likely outcomes. Or an individual that is meant to
display how something would work in or look on others.

moon The natural satellite of any planet.

observatory (in astronomy) The building or structure (such as a satellite) that houses
one or more telescopes.

orbit The curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a star, planet or
moon. One complete circuit around a celestial body.

physicist A scientist who studies the nature and properties of matter and energy.

planet A celestial object that orbits a star, is big enough for gravity to have squashed
it into a roundish ball and has cleared other objects out of the way in its orbital
neighborhood. To accomplish the third feat, the object must be big enough to have
pulled neighboring objects into the planet itself or to have slung them around the planet
and off into outer space.

pressure Force applied uniformly over a surface, measured as force per unit of area.

protoplanet A consolidating celestial object that might one day turn into a planet —
but only if its mass is large, it orbits some star, and during that orbiting it eventually
sweeps other debris out of its path.