Cancer immunotherapy seeks to reactivate and redirect the immune system of the patient to generate durable responses with the goal to prevent, control, and eliminate malignancies. This approach has revolutionized cancer treatment, leading to remarkable and clinical meaningful durable sustained responses, at least in a subset of patients.
Like classical prophylactic vaccines for infectious diseases, cancer vaccines aim to prompt the patient's immune system to recognize and eliminate the tumor. Therapeutic cancer vaccines consist of one or more tumor-specific antigenic sequences which are administered to the patient to induce an anti-tumor immune response that will find and eliminate the cancerous cells.
The field discriminates between personalized cancer approaches that are based on patient specific antigens, and shared neoantigen vaccines that contain a defined tumor-specific cargo. While the first need to be tailored for each individual patient, the second would be available “off-the-shelf”. Many platforms, such as DNA, RNA, peptides, or viral-based platforms can be used to deliver the antigenic sequence. The success of a cancer vaccine will be impacted by all the components of the vaccine, mainly the design of the antigenic sequence and the platform chosen, as well as by patient-related factors, such as the capacity of the immune system to mount an immune response as well as the capacity of the tumor to evade or inhibit such a response.
ViraTherapeutics is part of Boehringer Ingelheim and located in the vicinity of the Medical University Innsbruck campus. Our research expertise relies on the development of oncolytic virus therapies and viral-based cancer vaccines. As part of our research strategy for cancer vaccines, we focus on the discovery of “off-the-shelf” therapies leveraging the increased immunogenicity of a heterologous prime-boost regime. Current cancer-vaccine programs combine a peptide-based vaccine as a prime followed by a boost with an oncolytic-virus based vaccine. In line with this strategy, we strive to understand the mechanism of action of such virus-based vaccine combinations, with the aim to develop new and more efficient therapeutic vaccines.
At the DNA virus team, we are exploring the use of poxviruses from the family of parapoxvirus as cancer vaccine platform. We believe that our platform has clear advantages compared to the classical poxvirus-based vaccines derived from the orthopox family (e.g., MVA).
As part of this opnMe call, we invite scientists to submit novel research proposals that will seek to optimize our parapoxvirus-based vaccine platform. More specifically, we want to better understand its mode of action and factors governing the induction of an anti-tumor immune response. Examples are tissue and cellular tropism and kinetics of viral replication and how these impact the location, expression levels, and presentation of the vaccine cassettes, with the ultimate aim of further developing the platform and improving its therapeutic efficacy.
In summary, how would you propose to understand the mode of action of parapoxvirus-based cancer vaccines, with a focus on the viral-related factors, to identify and validate strategies to improve the therapeutic efficacy of this novel vaccine platform?
