Impact of Induced Syncytia Formation on the Oncolytic Potential of Myxoma Virus
Open Access
- 1 December 2019
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Oncolytic Virotherapy
- Vol. ume 8, 57-69
- https://doi.org/10.2147/ov.s220420
Abstract
Introduction: Cancer has become one of the most critical health issues of modern times. To overcome the ineffectiveness of current treatment options, research is being done to explore new therapeutic modalities. One such novel treatment is oncolytic virotherapy (OV) which uses tumor tropic viruses to specifically target and kill malignant cells. While OV has shown significant promise in recent clinical trials, the therapeutic use of viruses poses a number of unique challenges. In particular, obtaining effective viral spread throughout the tumor microenvironment remains problematic. Previous work has suggested this can be overcome by forcing oncolytic viruses to induce syncytia formation. Methods: In the current work, we generated a series of recombinant myxoma viruses expressing exogenous fusion proteins from other viral genomes and examined their therapeutic potential in vitro and in vivo. Results: Similar to previous studies, we observed that the expression of these fusion proteins during myxoma infection induced the formation of multinucleated syncytia which increased viral spread and lytic potential compared to non-fusogenic controls. Contrary to expectations, however, the treatment of established tumors with these viruses resulted in decreased therapeutic efficacy which corresponded with reduced viral persistence. Discussion: These findings indicate that enhanced viral spread caused by syncytia formation can actually reduce the efficacy of OV and supports a number of previous works suggesting that the in vitro properties of viruses frequently fail to predict their in vivo efficacy.Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- Oncolytic virotherapyNature Biotechnology, 2012
- Myxoma Virus: Propagation, Purification, Quantification, and StorageCurrent Protocols in Microbiology, 2010
- Myxoma Virus Oncolysis of Primary and Metastatic B16F10 Mouse Tumors In VivoMolecular Therapy, 2008
- Oncolytic viruses in cancer therapyCancer Letters, 2007
- Viruses as anticancer drugsTrends in Pharmacological Sciences, 2007
- The role of radiotherapy in cancer treatmentCancer, 2005
- Disruption of Erk-dependent type I interferon induction breaks the myxoma virus species barrierNature Immunology, 2004
- Role of the Serine-Threonine Kinase PAK-1 in Myxoma Virus ReplicationJournal of Virology, 2003
- Quantification and characterization of the bystander effect in prostate cancer cells following adenovirus-mediated FasL expressionCancer Gene Therapy, 2003
- Mechanisms of Cancer Drug ResistanceAnnual Review of Medicine, 2002