Cancer is among the most common causes of human deaths globally. Because of limitations and adverse effects of conventional cancer treatments, the need for new treatments is imminent. A rapidly expanding field in cancer therapy is cancer immunotherapy, which aims to, in one way or another, aid the patient’s own immune system in its battle against the tumor cells. A type of cancer immunotherapy is oncolytic virotherapy which utilizes viruses that either have a natural inclination to infect and replicate inside tumor cells or have been engineered to specially replicate in tumor cells causing oncolysis. An example of an oncolytic virus is the Lokon Oncolytic Adenovirus (LOAd). This virus specifically replicates inside cancer cells and is based on adenovirus serotype 5 but with a serotype 35 fiber, causing it to infect via the cluster of differentiation 46 receptor, which is ubiquitously expressed on somatic and tumor cells. A notable virus with the LOAd backbone, that is being evaluated in several clinical trials, is LOAd703, which is armed with the immunostimulatory transgenes 4-1BB ligand and a trimerized cluster of differentiation 40 ligands. In this project, I describe the development and evaluation of Ad703+, a cell killing adenovirus carrying the transgenes of LOAd703 as well as a novel cytotoxic transgene that never has been used in oncolytic virotherapy previously. This virus was developed using the AdEasy system, which is a replication-deficient virus platform based on adenovirus serotype 5. This virus enters cells using the human coxsackie and adenovirus receptor, which is homologous to the murine equivalent. The ability to express the immunostimulatory transgenes and the cell killing ability of Ad703+ was evaluated in two different human cell lines, HEK293 which allows the replication of Ad703+, and the lung cancer model A549. Ad703+ was shown to express the immunostimulatory transgenes in both of the cell lines, but in a replication-dependent manner. Ad703+ was also shown to exhibit cell killing ability in a replication-independent manner on par with other oncolytic viruses. The ability of Ad703+ to trigger cell death in a replication-independent manner opens up for the possible application in pre-clinical in vivo studies using mice due to its theoretical ability to infect murine cells and simulate viral oncolysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-512391 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Blomqvist, Carl |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för biologisk grundutbildning, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för immunologi, genetik och patologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0025 seconds