Development of Recombinant Oncolytic rVSV-mIL12-mGMCSF for Cancer Immunotherapy

Anti-cancer therapy based on oncolytic viruses (OVs) is a targeted approach that takes advantage of OVs’ ability to selectively infect and replicate in tumor cells, activate the host immune response, and destroy malignant cells over healthy ones. Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) is known for its wide range of advantages: a lack of pre-existing immunity, a genome that is easily amenable to manipulation, and rapid growth to high titers in a broad range of cell lines, to name a few. VSV-induced tumor immunity can be enhanced by the delivery of immunostimulatory cytokines. The targeted cytokine delivery to tumors avoids the significant toxicity associated with systemic delivery while also boosting the immune response. To demonstrate this enhanced effect on both tumor growth and survival, a novel recombinant VSV (rVSV)-mIL12-mGMCSF, co-expressing mouse IL-12 (interleukin-12) and GM-CSF (granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor), was tested alongside rVSV-dM51-GFP (rVSV-GFP) that was injected intratumorally in a syngeneic in vivo C57BL/6 mouse model infused subcutaneously with B16-F10 melanoma cells. The pilot study tested the effect of two viral injections 4 days apart and demonstrated that treatment with the two rVSVs resulted in partial inhibition of tumor growth (TGII of around 40%) and an increased survival rate in animals from the treatment groups. The effect of the two VSVs on immune cell populations will be investigated in future in vivo studies with an optimized experimental design with multiple higher viral doses, as a lack of this information presents a limitation of this study.