Search for 'What is a viral infection?', read down from there to '1. Attachment' and make sure to expand the help tip on that one.
From a 30 sec scan of the article, this is about a specific virus' preferential binding to a site that is expressed in many cancer tumors (anthrax toxin receptor 1, ANTXR1).
This would allow viral-driven targeting of those cells (and few others), one of the hardest problems in oncology. You can't hit what you can't find, or you have to soak the entire body in enough toxic chemicals (chemo) to ensure it reaches the tumor cells.
As with many things in microbiology, it seems we knew this virus could preferentially target cancerous tumors. But we didn't know precisely why (aka "the mechanism") or how. This paper is proposing an answer to that question.
Microbiology is essentially the study of how to build 3d puzzles with chemistry and physics. Doing that is hard.
I'd highly recommend learning the basics of biology at the microbiology and biochemical levels. It's a fascinating world, helps explain everyday macro-medicine (read: what a doctor tells you), and I've found a surprising number of useful parallels in computing systems design.
(Correct me if I'm off on anything, it's been a while since microbiology)
Search for 'What is a viral infection?', read down from there to '1. Attachment' and make sure to expand the help tip on that one.
From a 30 sec scan of the article, this is about a specific virus' preferential binding to a site that is expressed in many cancer tumors (anthrax toxin receptor 1, ANTXR1).
This would allow viral-driven targeting of those cells (and few others), one of the hardest problems in oncology. You can't hit what you can't find, or you have to soak the entire body in enough toxic chemicals (chemo) to ensure it reaches the tumor cells.
As with many things in microbiology, it seems we knew this virus could preferentially target cancerous tumors. But we didn't know precisely why (aka "the mechanism") or how. This paper is proposing an answer to that question.
Microbiology is essentially the study of how to build 3d puzzles with chemistry and physics. Doing that is hard.
I'd highly recommend learning the basics of biology at the microbiology and biochemical levels. It's a fascinating world, helps explain everyday macro-medicine (read: what a doctor tells you), and I've found a surprising number of useful parallels in computing systems design.
(Correct me if I'm off on anything, it's been a while since microbiology)