Oncolytic Virus Therapy: A Promising Approach to Immunotherapy
An oncolytic virus is a unique virus that favorably infects and kills cancer cells. These are deployed as a part of cancer immunotherapy and act by selectively targeting cancer cells and carrying out oncolysis. The oncolytic virus is known to kill the cancer cells directly and stimulate the patient's own anti-tumor immune responses. The first oncolytic virus immunotherapy was approved in Latvia in 2004 for the treatment of skin melanoma. Inevitable changes in the environment occurring due to human activity are giving rise to various factors leading to an increase in the incidence of numerous cutaneous malignancies, including non-melanoma skin cancer.
The conventional radiation and chemotherapy for the treatment of various cancers, including skin melanomas, have a restricted therapeutic index and an array of therapy related side effects. The first US FDA approved oncolytic herpes virus (a modified herpes simplex virus) is the drug talimogene laherparepvec (OncoVex, T-VEC), approved in 2015 for the treatment of advanced inoperable melanoma.
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Oncolytic virotherapy is considered as one of the major breakthroughs in immunotherapy especially in terms of enhancing the immune response to tumor. Oncolytic virus, a genetically modified virus, infects and kills cancer cells but leaves the normal cells unharmed; after which, tumor antigens will be released by the dying cancer cells that allow the cancer to be recognized by the immune system.
To date, National Cancer Institute (NCI) revealed that the talimogene laherparepyec is the only FDA-approved oncolytic virus treatment. This is a genetically modified form of herpes virus, (cold sore virus) used for treating melanoma. The virus is able to secrete the protein that stimulates the production of immune cells in the body thus, the risk of causing of herpes will be reduced.
Oncolytic therapy treats many types of cancer. This includes melanoma, ovarian cancer, cervical cancer, brain cancer, and many others. Specific viruses were genetically designed to kill each of type of cancerous tumor.
The production of viral vectors is one of the important process in this therapy. A viral vector is a virus that carries a specific genome and (add more description). It can be proliferated through infecting a chosen stable cell line, which are usually adherent in nature. The virus titer depends on the host cell line which provides a suitable environment for genome amplification and expression. Mammalian cell lines are commonly used cell for the virus production. Since mammalian cells are commonly used for this production, shear stress and cell culture media must be considered for overall culture success.
Esco VacciXcell Tide Motion bioreactors offers excellent mass production of viral vectors as the gentle vertical oscillation of the culture media is achieved. Once infected in the host cell line, large amounts of these vectors will be found in the culture supernatant after days of culture, which can then be continuously harvested from the bioreactor. After harvesting, new culture medium can perfuse in the bioreactor for continuous production. Flexibility in terms of purification after culture is also reduced since BioNOC™ II generates low lint waste. This resolves the time-consuming, downstream processing issue.
References:
https://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/oncolytic-virus-therapy-market