Oncolytic Virotherapy Development for Combination Therapy with Cancer Vaccines
Oncolytic virotherapy (OV) represents an exciting new area of cancer treatment by exploiting a virus's ability to selectively replicate and kill tumor tissue while stimulating a patient-specific immune response against cancer. They kill infected cancer and associated endothelial cells via direct oncolysis, and uninfected cells via tumor vasculature targeting and bystander effect. They play important roles in revert a non-inflamed phenotype into an inflamed phenotype and have the capability to trigger immunogenic cell death. With extensive experience in oncolytic virotherapy, Creative Biolabs offers a myriad of OV vaccines for various viruses and antigens.
Cancer vaccine used to treat either existing cancer or prevent development of a cancer that expose the immune system to an antigen. Vaccines targeting cancer antigens can be used to induce anti-tumor immunity and have demonstrated therapeutic efficacy both pre-clinically and clinically. In addition, oncolytic viruses can accelerate the efficacy of cancer vaccines by igniting an immune response and also can utilize established tumors as an in situ source of neoantigen vaccination through cross-presentation, resulting in regression of distant, uninfected tumors. Based on this understanding, Creative Biolabs focuses on OVs as a platform for cancer vaccination as well as the different strategies using oncolytic viruses to trigger anti-tumor immunity and more viruses and combinations have been tested.
Our combination of oncolytic virotherapy and cancer vaccines services include but not limited to:
TAA-Encoding OVs
OVs can be armed with tumor antigens to enhance the anti-cancer immune response. TAA-encoding OVs can efficiently trigger an immune response against poorly immunogenic antigens.
Fig 1. TAA-encoding OVs used for cancer vaccination.
Heterologous Virus Prime-Boost for Cancer Vaccination
Heterologous viral vectors which encoding the same antigen used for priming and boosting agents better directs the development of an immune response towards the encoded antigen. According to the characteristics of each virus, some virus can be used to prime the immune response, and meanwhile others can be used as boosting agents.
Fig 2. Heterologous Virus Prime-Boost for Cancer Vaccination.
Alternative Vaccination Strategies Using OVs
An alternative way to avoid immune recognition is to modify the appearance of the virus to the immune system.
- Coating Viruses
Directly coating the viral particles with antigenic peptides can improve efficacy and induced stronger anti-tumor immunity.
- cDNA Libraries
For situations where it is not possible to predict and test immunogenic epitopes, the most plausible vaccination strategies use the OVs encoding cDNA libraries.
Creative Biolabs has developed a comprehensive cancer therapy platform for combining oncolytic virus with cancer vaccines specific to various types of tumors. Our scientists make every endeavor to explore different strategies as well as ways to circumvent some limitations of cancer vaccines. Creative Biolabs focuses on predicting of immunogenic antigens and providing a more personalized vaccination approach to match the demands of clients worldwide in preclinical investigations. Please feel free to contact us for more details and our scientists will tailor the most reasonable scheme for your projects, we will be pleased to serve you.
References:
- Aitken, A. S., Roy, D. G., & Bourgeois-Daigneault, M. C. (2017). Taking a stab at cancer; oncolytic virus-mediated anti-cancer vaccination strategies. Biomedicines, 5(1), 3.
- Twumasi-Boateng, K., Pettigrew, J. L., Kwok, Y. E., Bell, J. C., & Nelson, B. H. (2018). Oncolytic viruses as engineering platforms for combination immunotherapy. Nature Reviews Cancer, 1.