toh

I am extremely grateful and pleased for the $7.5 million grant announced this week from Terry Fox Research Institute. It is crucial for my extended team (COVCo, which is a trans-Canadian network of clinical and basic scientists) to develop and advance the use of viruses as a revolutionary approach in the fight against cancer. These viruses, called oncolytic viruses (OVs) are targeted therapies that can infect and destroy tumour cells, while leaving normal tissues unaffected.

We have created multi-disciplinary teams, located at several cancer centres across the country, that are studying how to optimize OV therapy. Our projects are testing new concepts and developing a comprehensive approach to OV therapy. For instance, we now know that OVs attack cancers in multiple ways, including: direct infection and destruction of tumour tissue; recruitment and activation of the patient’s own immune cells to the infected tumour site; and specific attack upon the blood vessels that feed the tumour.

Our teams are developing strategies that optimize each of these properties so that our OVs infect and acutely destroy the tumour, while at the same time educating the patient’s immune system to recognize the cancer as foreign and creating long-lasting anti-tumour immunity.

The goal of our team is to create a targeted, multi-pronged, therapeutic approach that will have potent anti-cancer activity with few, if any, side effects.

http://www.ohri.ca

Dr. John Bell
Senior Scientist, Cancer Therapeutics
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute

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