Oncolytic effect of wild-type Newcastle disease virus isolates in cancer cell lines in vitro and in vivo on xenograft model

Oncolyic virotherapy is one of the modern experimental techniques to treat human cancers. Here we studied the antitumor activity of wild-type Newcastle disease virus (NDV) isolates from Russian migratory birds. We showed that NDV could selectively kill malignant cells without affecting healthy cells. We evaluated the oncolytic effect of 44 NDV isolates in 4 histogenetically different human cell lines (HCT116, HeLa, A549, MCF7). The safety of the isolates was also tested in normal peripheral blood mononuclear (PBMC) cells. The viability of tumor cell lines after incubation with NDV isolates was evaluated by MTT. All cell lines, except for normal PBMC primary cells, had different degrees of susceptibility to NDV infection. Seven NDV strains had the highest oncolytic activity, and some NDV strains demonstrated oncolytic selectivity for different cell lines. In vivo, we described the intratumoral activity of NDV/Altai/pigeon/770/2011 against subcutaneous non-small cell lung carcinoma using xenograft SCID mice model. All animals were responsive to therapy. Histology confirmed therapy-induced destructive changes and growing necrotic bulk density in tumor tissue. Our findings indicate that wild-type NDV strains selectively kill tumor cells with no effect on healthy PBMC cells, and intratumoral virotherapy with NDV suppresses the subcutaneous tumor growth in SCID mice.