Some anticancer drugs can block Ebola virus replication

Certain anticancer drugs may be effective against the deadly Ebola virus. An Emory research team has found that the drug nilotinib (Tasigna), approved for the treatment of leukemia, can inhibit the ability of Ebola to replicate in the laboratory.

In previous research they found that nilotinib could be used to fight smallpox and tuberculosis. The drugs shut down human enzymes that some bacteria and viruses exploit. Nilotinib could reduce viral production by infected cells by up to 10,000 fold.

“We had suspected for a long time that many viruses might use the same enzymes at the point where they emerge from an infected cell,” says Daniel Kalmen, an Emory pathologist, who teamed up on the study with Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

One advantage to using drugs that affect such enzymes is that the virus is unlikely to be able to mutate and generate a drugresistant strain, Kalmen says.

Duping cancer cells

While radiation kills cancer cells by inducing DNA damage, some cancer cells evade death by self-repair. Emory researchers have found that if they can sneak RNA molecules into cancer cells, the damaged DNA cannot repair itself.

The method could allow oncologists to enhance the tumor-killing effects of radiation, says Ya Wang, director of Experimental Radiation Oncology at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute. She and her team used modified lentiviruses to push RNA molecules into cancer cells in the laboratory. Her team is now testing whether a small peptide tag can direct RNA to brain tumors.

Previous RNA interference techniques to silence a gene targeted only the coding region, which makes RNA unstable. Wang’s team targeted both the coding region and the noncoding region, which blocks protein production. This method made brain cancer and lung cancer cells two to three times more sensitive to X-ray radiation.