Virus, oncolytic virus and human prostate cancer

Prostate cancer (PCa), a disease, is characterized by abnormal cell growth in the prostate - a gland in the male reproductive system. PCa is one of the leading causes of cancer death among men of all races. Although older age and a family history of the disease have been recognized as the risk factors of PCa, the cause of this cancer remains unclear. Mounting evidence suggests that infections with various viruses are causally linked to PCa pathogenesis. Published studies have provided strong evidence that at least two viruses (RXMV and HPV) contribute to prostate tumourigenicity and impact on the survival of patients with malignant PCa. Traditional therapies including chemotherapy and radiotherapy are unable to distinguish cancer cells from normal cells, which are a significant drawback and leads to toxicities for PCa patients undergoing treatment. So far, few other options are available for treating patients with advanced PCa. Virotherapy is being developed to be a novel therapy for cancers, which uses oncotropic and oncolytic viruses with their abilities to find and destroy malignant cells in the body. For PCa treatment, oncolytic virotherapy appears to be much more attractive, which uses live viruses to selectively kill cancer cells. Oncolytic viruses can be genetically engineered to induce cancer cell lysis through virus replication and expression of cytotoxic proteins. As oncolytic viruses are a relatively new class of anti-cancer immunotherapy agents, several important barriers still exist on the road to the use of oncolytic viruses for PCa therapy. In this review, we first discuss the controversy of the contribution of virus infection to PCa, and subsequently summarize the development of oncolytic virotherapy for PCa in the past several years