Could viruses be used to cure cancer?

Viruses can mutate very quickly, and custom viruses and cocktails can be made. So could you selectively bread a virus that attacks cancer cells?

Could viruses be used to cure cancer?free anti virus

There are some experimental products that involve the introduction of viruses to cancerous tumors that should make the immune systm attack the tunopr, but not have bee amaingly succesful.

Could viruses be used to cure cancer?internet security software

yes
If a virus is able to attack cancer cells, it would mean that this virus will attack ordinary cells THAT MULTIPLY FAST. The concept to chemo therapy is the same. The cells that multiply rapidly is destroyed. Such as yr skin, hair, the linings of yr gut.

Right now with genetic engineering anything is possible. But for a virus to target JUST cancer cells would be near impossible. Yes it will target cancer cells but other cells that multiply fast via mitosis would also be a casualty of this treatment. Scientists would have thought of that.
the technology isn't there yet, but it's theoretically possible to engineer a retrovirus that will ''shut off'' a cancer cell and have no appreciable effect on normal cells. we know that there are certain genetic mutations that cause certain cancers, such as the BRCA genes and breast cancer. if in fact we could shut off that specific gene without altering any others, then we might in fact be able to cure the cancer. however, like i said, making such a specific retrovirus that will do that is beyond our current capabilities.
Well what is cancer? Well put simply is cellular division gone wrong. The reason why is due to mutation in genes that control this process. For simplicity, imagine a protein that could prevent the cell from dividing, by inactivating other proteins that where responsible for causing the cell to divide. The decision to divide would be governed by the balance between the two. What if there was a mutation in the gene that prevented to cell from dividing, causing the protein to be incapable of inactivating the pro-division proteins. This could cause the cell to divide and to keep dividing as the mutation would be passed on to the progeny. What could we do to stop the cells from dividing? Well we could give the cells a working copy of the gene that was mutated. You may now ask yourself how? Well we could use gene therapy, which is basically giving the person the correct gene. This is where viruses come in to play. A virus is an obligate intracellular molecular parasite. It works by infecting the cell and taking over the cells replication and protein synthesis machinery in order to replicate its self. Some viruses also insert their genes into there hosts DNA, this property can be and has been used to correct curtain genes already. So to come back to the mutation I mentioned earlier, what if we inserted the correct gene into the cells using a virus the cell would then have a new working genetic code to make the a functioning protein. The protein would then be able to inactivate the other protein that where causing the cells to divide. In theory this should prevent the cancer from growing. This is only a simple example in practice it is much more complicated than I suggest here, but there is research going on now with the purpose of trying to manipulate viruses to correct mutation; the fundamental cause of cancer.
Any virus that will attack cancer cells will also attack regular somatic cells. That wouldn't work too well.