How viruses infect cells is key to developing safe oncolytic viral therapies. In this post we discuss how viruses can be engineered to target cancer cells. The infection process begins when a virus recognizes and attaches to a host cell. This attachment is typically mediated by viral proteins known as glycoproteins, which specifically bind to […]
The biggest problem in cancer therapeutics is selectivity. Using oncolytic viral therapies, high selectivity can be achieved using the combination of selective infection and selective replication. Here, we want to address selective replication. For DNA viruses, this can be accomplished with promoters to control transcription and genome replication. However, for RNA viruses, this does not […]
We were thrilled to present a poster of our work at AACR. It is one of the biggest conferences on cancer research, with 22,000 visitors. To get accepted, we had to write an abstract, which was reviewed, and we needed to be sponsored by an existing member. For us this was Dr. Sanjeev Vasudevan, whom […]
Brenda Ho Q: Tell me a bit about yourself Hello! My name is Brenda and I grew up in Montgomery County Maryland. I spent a lot of my weekends visiting DC going to museums and visiting monuments nearby. The National Museum of Natural History is where I first fell in love with research and it […]
In this post we give an overview of the history of using viruses as potential treatment for cancer. We also outline the challenges a great viral therapy needs to overcome. Last, we review our approach to rationally design and engineer safe and effective oncolytic viruses. History and current state Since the middle of the last […]
In this post, I would like to introduce the Humane Genomics Artificial Virus Platform. Why develop an artificial virus platform? For decades, a lot of research has been conducted to see if natural viruses can be used as cancer therapeutics, with limited success. Over the last 10 years, the technology to engineer, to build viruses […]
Rupsa Basu Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. My name is Rupsa Basu and I am a viral immunologist by passion and a backpacker at heart. My mantra of life is to dream, believe and achieve. As a seven years old kid, I started dreaming about becoming a scientist and developed an increased interest […]
Looking back, 2020 was quite the year. We designed 200 unique oncolytic viruses, and we confirmed 163 viruses are working (replication competent) in the lab. Among these, we engineered 42 glycoproteins, 29 promoters and 14 therapeutic genes. We generated more than 10 billion virus particles over the year, which we tested in 11 research […]
Taylor Flaat Q: Tell me a bit about yourself. My name is Taylor Flaat and I am from Panama City Beach, Florida, although I was actually born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. We moved from Grand Forks when I was just two years old and my family has been in Panama City ever since. I […]
It has been almost 7 months since the last update of our work on the COVID-19 vaccine candidate. In this post, we share the results and what we have learned. Because there are several other vaccines available that are highly effective against SARS-CoV-2, we decided to stop further research on our vaccine and to focus […]