Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Many lung cancer drugs including immunotherapies do not work as effectively as they could because they do not reach the tumor, and they have unintended toxic side effects on healthy cells. Thus, methods to deliver drugs preferentially to lung tumor tissues are needed to enhance their efficacy and minimize their adverse effects. My project aims to develop a new way of delivering immunotherapy to lung tumors in mice using oncolytic viruses (OVs). OVs multiply specifically inside cancer cells, causing them to die, whereas normal cells have defense systems that allow them to clear the virus. As such, OVs specifically kill cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue. Our lab is interested in a specific immunotherapy that targets a protein called CD47 which helps lung tumors escape destruction by the immune system. Current immunotherapies that target CD47, called CD47 blockade, cause severe toxicities in normal cells which prevents their effectiveness in patients. Since OVs can be engineered to deliver CD47 blockade specifically to cancer cells, we believe it could be an effective way to unleash its therapeutic effects without causing toxicity to normal tissues. My work to date has shown that OVs carrying CD47 blockade, which we call OV-CD47, are well tolerated in mice with no toxic side effects. My initial studies also suggest that OV-CD47 strongly impairs tumor growth in mice and completely eradicates the tumors in some mice. In contrast to traditional modes of delivering CD47 blockade in patients, these promising results demonstrate that OV-CD47 is an innovative, safe, and effective method for delivering CD47 blockade without any toxicities. Pending further development and testing, the OV-CD47 we have engineered represents a clinically feasible approach for unleashing the therapeutic effects of CD47 blockade that could be used to treat a large fraction of lung cancer patients who are ineligible for or resistant to currently approved immunotherapies.