需要开发能够减轻患者不适的新型癌症治疗模式。一种可能的新疗法是使用溶瘤病毒（能杀死癌细胞的病毒）。只有最近我们能够操纵病毒基因组，才使得我们可以考虑故意感染癌症患者。一个关键的考虑因素是确保病毒只针对癌细胞，并不对邻近的非癌细胞造成伤害。在这里，我们使用一个病毒感染数学模型来确定一个病毒需要具备的特征，以便消灭肿瘤但不伤害非癌细胞。我们得出的结论是，该病毒在感染这两种不同细胞类型时必须有所不同，非癌细胞的感染率需要小于癌细胞的感染率的百分之一。仅仅依靠病毒产生速率或感染细胞死亡率的差异是不足以保护非癌细胞的。版权所有 © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. 保留所有权利。

New cancer treatment modalities that limit patient discomfort need to be developed. One possible new therapy is the use of oncolytic (cancer-killing) viruses. It is only recently that our ability to manipulate viral genomes has allowed us to consider deliberately infecting cancer patients with viruses. One key consideration is to ensure that the virus exclusively targets cancer cells and does not harm nearby non-cancerous cells. Here, we use a mathematical model of viral infection to determine the characteristics a virus would need to have in order to eradicate a tumor, but leave non-cancerous cells untouched. We conclude that the virus must differ in its ability to infect the two different cell types, with the infection rate of non-cancerous cells needing to be less than one hundredth of the infection rate of cancer cells. Differences in viral production rate or infectious cell death rate alone are not sufficient to protect non-cancerous cells.Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.