Suppose we could design a virus or bacteria that attacks and kills any cell that is unable to produce menin, but has no effect on other cells. This would seem to prevent MEN1 tumors from developing. But how would this really work? Do we design the virus so that it is unable to harm cells containing menin? Perhaps the virus is able to infect all types of cells, but is inactivated in the presence of menin.
But this would seem to depend on there always being at least some minimum level of menin production in all normal cells. I don't know whether this is the case. It has been reported that menin "is ubiquitously expressed in tissues examined, although its expression levels are variable among different tissues"(3). If we're lucky, we develop a virus that is able to destroy individual menin-deficient cells surrounded by cells that are not menin-deficient, and the result is that any cells unable to produce menin are destroyed, and all other cells are unaffected.
If we're not quite so lucky, maybe we find that normal cells sometimes produce very little or no menin during part of their life cycle, and we wouldn't want them destroyed by our hypothetical virus. But in this case perhaps there is a different method our virus could use to detect cells whose MEN1 genes are both nonfunctional.
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