Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Malignant melanoma is a common cancer and the most aggressive skin cancer. It is becoming increasingly common, especially in countries with many fair-skinned individuals. We have seen numerous new therapies for the treatment of melanoma in the past several years, however there are many patients who do not benefit from such therapies. For this reason, there is a demand for new treatments that can overcome the shortcomings of the ones that are currently in use. One possibility that has demonstrated success in clinical trials is the use of viruses which are able to infect and kill cancer cells, while leaving normal healthy cells unaffected. We propose the development of a new virus-based therapy for the treatment of malignant melanoma. The viruses that we are using to develop this therapy have been used extensively in vaccines and therefore have a proven safety track record in humans. We are forming new viruses through the recombination of several different vaccine strains, which leaves us with a "library" of thousands of unique viruses that have not been generated before. We will then select individual viruses out of this "library" that are best adapted to grow in tumours that have been surgically removed from patients. We expect that this approach will result in a clinical candidate oncolytic virus and provide a treatment alternative for patients suffering from this aggressive form of skin cancer who otherwise have poor prognoses.