Virus that helped eradicate smallpox takes on cancer in startups dual-mechanism immunotherapy

With a little genetic engineering, the vaccine that was key in helping eradicate smallpox more than 30 years ago could also be key in curing cancer, if a young Cleveland biotech has anything to say about it.

Western Oncolytics is developing a dual-mechanism therapy that combines oncolytic virus and gene therapy technologies with the hope of wiping out the ability of cancer cells to survive in the body.

CEO Kurt Rote is a first-time entrepreneur, but you wouldnt know it from talking to him. After getting a biomedical engineering degree from Duke and moving to Switzerland to get an MBA, he worked for a short time at a small biotech firm before deciding to risk everything to realize a personal dream of curing cancer.

In pursuit of bleeding-edge technology, he started making calls to university researchers.I went down a list of NIH grants and talked to as many of them as possible, he said. I wanted to go where the science led me.

Where it led him was to the office of Stephen H. Thorne at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center, who had been studying oncolytic viruses for years.

Oncolytic viruses are genetically modified to infect and kill cancer cells while simultaneously triggering an anti-tumor immune response. Their promise lies in being able to treat cancers with side effects that parallel those of a flu shot, rather than those from chemotherapy.

Although theyve been studied for decades, theyre just now advancing to the point where theyre being tested in large-scale human trials. Amgen recently completed a Phase 3 study in melanoma patients of an oncolytic virus it bought from Biovex in a 2011 deal worth up to $1 billion. The results of the trial were mixed, potentially limiting the commercial viability of the drug, but the trial serves as an important milestone for the field.

The therapy developed in Thornes lab employs similar concepts but is based on more advanced technology and has shown better tumor shrinkage and remission in animal testing, Rote said.

A number of different elements work together in the vaccine. It contains the vaccinia virus (used in the smallpox vaccine) with three gene modifications: the addition of two that signal T-cells to come to the tumor and reduce the number of immune suppressor cells in the tumor, respectively, and the deletion of a viral gene which leads to infected cells sending more signals to the immune system.

And, to avoid the immune system from being triggered immediately, before the virus reaches the tumor, scientists have modified its surface to delay the immune response.

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Virus that helped eradicate smallpox takes on cancer in startups dual-mechanism immunotherapy