From Science Daily
September 18, 2018
Glioblastoma kills about 15,000 adults in the US each year and is currently incurable because patients experience a high recurrence rate of their cancer even after the standard treatments of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Scientists suspect this recurrence is due to cancer stem cells, called glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs), which hide out in nearby brain tissue even after the combination of therapies.
“During the Zika epidemic, we learned that the virus preferentially infects neural progenitor cells in the fetus, and causes the devastating microcephaly seen in babies born to infected mothers,” says Pei-Yong Shi, a virologist at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He co-led the current study with tumor biologist Jianghong Man of the National Center of Biomedical Analysis in Beijing and virologist Cheng-Feng Qin of the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing.