#Paywall Beating back cancer with self-made virotherapy: a Croatia-based virologist used lab-grown viruses to shrink her tumor, raising ethical debates about self-experimentation in medical research. 🧪🧬 #CancerResearch #Virotherapy #MedicalEthics
The Eye of the Needle in Oncolytic #Virotherapy by Alberta's Thomas Hillen in this week's post. A counter intuitive way to treat cancer that will remain underused unless #MathOnco comes to help:
https://mathematical-oncology.org/blog/eye-needle-oncolytic-virotherapy.html
Author summary Oncolytic virotherapy is a promising form of cancer treatment that uses viruses to target, infect and kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, this form of therapy is often not effective, due to the occurrence of virus-resistant tumor cells. As it is challenging to assess the emergence and spread of resistance experimentally or in (pre)clinical studies, we designed a model that allows to study the spatial dynamics of virus-sensitive and virus-resistant tumor cells in various scenarios, and to predict the efficacy of virotherapy. By analysing the model systematically, we demonstrate the importance of 2D and 3D spatial interactions, the effects of viral properties (such as replication rate and range of infection), the properties of virus-resistant cancer cells (such as the cost of resistance), and the sensitivity of healthy (non-tumor) cells towards viral infection. Our goal is to provide a sound conceptual understanding of the mechanisms underlying therapeutic failure, which eventually may lead to the discovery of strategies that improve therapeutic efficacy. We therefore provide the reader with a graphical and a terminal interface of our model (executable on a local computer), allowing practitioners to reflect on their intuition regarding the complex yet fascinating dynamics of oncolytic virotherapy.
Sharing our latest publication that demonstrates that mobilizing DCs to increase tumor antigen cross-presentation improves #oncolytic #virotherapy
🐦🔥nemo™🐦⬛ 🇺🇦🍉
David Basanta Gutierrez
thijsjanzen
Judit Svensson Arvelund