Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Cancer remains the "Emperor of all Maladies" causing over 85,000 deaths per year in Canada as well as leaving tremendous economic and sociological carnage in its wake. With current estimations that 2 in 5 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime, there is little doubt that Canadians want and need novel, safe and effective cancer therapeutics. Oncolytic virotherapy represents one of the most innovative fields of cancer immunotherapy. It uses viruses that selectively infect and kill cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Some oncolytic viruses have received FDA approval for treatments of specific cancers, but they must be administered to the tumor through direct injection, which requires complicated surgical procedures and limits applicability to certain cancers. This proposal is aimed at optimizing a new class of viral therapeutics with the potential to significantly improve cancer patient care by enabling effective systemic delivery through intravenous injections. The strategy involves coating the viral therapeutics with "don't eat me" signals that protect the virus from the patient's immune system in the bloodstream and peripheral tissues, and consequently increases the amount of virus reaching the tumor. The immune-resistance markers are only coated on the initial generation of viral therapeutic so there is a low risk of it promoting infection in healthy tissues. By increasing the efficiency of systemic delivery, oncolytic virotherapy will have broader applications against different cancers and will have a greater advantage against metastatic disease.