In the Cancer Therapy Research Center in Wuerzburg, supported by the generosity of the HOPE REALIZED MEDICAL FOUNDATION, we have initiated completely novel approaches to Cancer therapy: personalized, autologous cell protected oncolytic immune therapy.
For our innovative approach, we decided to try personalized, induced pluripotent cells iPCs as “Trojan Horse” for protection of Vaccinia virus (VV) particles. This approach will give every person a novel cell system, which can be stored, can be used as VV carrier in inflammation treatment with no tissue rejection. Also preclinical experiments have to be completed before human clinical trials can be initiated at Stanford and in Wuerzburg. Negotiations with Genelux Corporation were initiated, the GMP production and providing the phase III VV for our trials is a possibility, in return for sharing trial results.
During the past 2 years, we have made progress in selecting the most efficacious VV strains from all the approved small pox vaccines in the world for immune therapy of cancer. We compared their efficacy in tumor therapy in animal models, as well as their replication in autologous and allogeneic cell carrier. We are also generating novel engineered VV strains with multiple tumor epitope cassettes for enhanced anti-tumor immunity. We are also investigating the glycosylation of VV proteins in different tumor cell lines, protected carrier cell lines as well as in tumor biopsies. We are trying to correlate glycosylations with immune cell recruitment and anti-tumor immunity.
