Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Pancreatic cancer has the worst survival rate of all the major cancers, with a 5-year survival rate of only 7%, and 75% of patients dying within the first year of diagnosis. The dismal survival rates of pancreatic cancer- attributable to late stage at diagnosis and a lack of effective treatment strategies have remained largely unchanged over the past 30 years, emphasizing the need for new therapies to treat this deadly disease. Oncolytic viruses (OVs) represent an innovative therapeutic approach for the treatment of cancer. OVs infect and kill cancer cells in a highly specific manner that minimizes the effect on normal cells, and has shown promising indications of clinical benefit in a number of early phase clinical trials. Our group found that pancreatic tumor cells and the surrounding non-tumors cells that support and promote tumour growth are significantly more sensitive to OVs than normal cells of the pancreas, suggesting that OVs may be a promising therapeutic approach for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. The goal of this study is to improve our understanding of what makes pancreatic tumor cells and tumour supporting cells susceptible to OV infection in order to engineer more effective viruses capable of infecting and killing a greater number of cancerous cells. Such improved OVs could generate lasting remissions in a larger proportion of patients. The findings from this work have the potential to be immediately translated into the clinic to generate more effective therapies for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.