Modified Virus Infects Tumors and Activates the Immune System with Mark Bertagnolli ViroMissile

Mark Bertagnolli, Chief Operating Officer at ViroMissile, has developed a modified vaccinia virus that can be delivered intravenously to seek out and destroy solid tumors throughout the body and is not dependent on a specific genetic driver of a cancer. The virus has been engineered to be resistant to the body's complement system, allowing it to survive in the bloodstream longer to infect the tumor. This action also turns the tumor microenvironment from cold to hot, signaling the immune system to attack the tumor and potentially working in combination with other treatments like PD-1 inhibitors to make them more effective. Mark explains, "ViroMissile has a modified vaccinia virus, and viruses tend to like to infect tumor cells. So the trick has been how to harness this. And we're on our third generation of virus, and we have a virus that you can inject intravenously that searches for tumors throughout the body, infects them, the body clears the rest of the virus, and the virus embeds itself in the tumors, replicates, spreads, activates the immune system, and destroys the tumors."   "So, the vaccinia virus itself, nobody knows really where it came from, but it ended up being the foundation of the smallpox vaccine, and we get the word vaccine from the vaccinia virus. Our founder was the first to sequence the genome of the vaccinia virus over 30 years ago. For the last 20 years, he's been working on it as an oncolytic agent. And in this particular case, within vaccinia, there are different strains. And he was able to isolate a very specific, never before isolated strain of virus that is resistant to complement attack, and also replicates very quickly in infected cells. So it has two embedded features within it, naturally, that we're able to capitalize on."   #ViroMissile #CancerResearch #Immunotherapy #OncolyticVirus #Biotechnology #MedicalInnovation #CancerTreatment #PrecisionMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #CancerCare #VacciniaVirus viromissile.com Download the transcript here