“This innovation involves reprogramming a patient’s own tumour to make it a candidate for existing therapies, and opens up powerful new combination strategies for therapeutic development,” said the researchers.A new study by researchers at The Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa suggests that tumour engineering could be a powerful new approach to make more cancer patients eligible for targeted immunotherapies.

There are many highly-effective immunotherapies available in the clinic, but few cancer patients are eligible for these treatments because their tumours must have specific targetable proteins, like HER2.

The study, published in Nature Communications, showed that a cancer-targeted virus can produce artificial proteins that decorate the surface of cancer cells to make them susceptible to the blockbuster breast cancer drug trastuzumab, which targets HER2. The researchers then used another virus to stimulate an immune attack against the HER2-expressing cancer cells. This double virus approach achieved cure rates close to 50 per cent in aggressive mouse cancer models.

“This innovation involves reprogramming a patient’s own tumour to make it a candidate for existing therapies, and opens up powerful new combination strategies for therapeutic development,” said co-first authors Drs. Zaid Taha and Mathieu Crupi, who were supervised by Drs. Jean-Simon Diallo and John Bell, respectively.

Authors: Taha Z*, Crupi MJF*, Alluqmani N, MacKenzie D, Vallati S, Whelan JT, Fareez F, Alwithenani A, Petryk J, Chen A, Spinelli MM, Ng K, Sobh J, de Souza CT, Bharadwa PR, Lee TKH, Thomas DA, Huang BZ, Kassas O, Poutou J, Gilchrist VH, Boulton S, Thomson M, Marius R, Hooshyar M, McComb S, Arulanandam R, Ilkow CS, Bell JC, Diallo JS. [*=co-first]

Core resources: Global Tissue Consent and Collection, Pharmacy, Flow Cytometry, Cell Biology and Image Acquisition, Histology, Preclinical Imaging, Animal Care Veterinary Service

Funders: Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Terry Fox Foundation, Canadian Cancer Society, Lotte & John Hecht Memorial Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Mitacs, BioCanRx, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Government of Ontario, The Ottawa Hospital Foundation, Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation, King Faisal Specialist Hospital, Umm AlQura University.

The Ottawa Hospital is a leading academic health, research and learning hospital proudly affiliated with the University of Ottawa. All researchers at The Ottawa Hospital follow a Responsible Innovation Framework for developing and commercializing innovations in a responsible way. Researchers involved in this study hold patents related to this work.