The long-term goal of our lab is to develop novel therapeutics based on replication-competent viruses for cancer therapy.

We are currently developing the non-pathogenic vaccine strain of measles virus for treatment of ovarian cancer. The virus is tumor specific: it causes extensive cytopathic effects of cell-to-cell fusion in cancer cells but negligible damage in normal cells. When injected intratumorally, intravenously, or intraperitoneally into mice bearing human tumors, the virus inhibited tumor growth or caused complete regression of the tumors. The first of our recombinant measles virus, genetically modified to express a soluble marker peptide for non-invasive monitoring of viral gene expression (MV-CEA), is being tested in a phase I clinical trial for patients with recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer.

Projects are currently underway in the following areas:

1)To elucidate the mechanism underlying the tumor specificity of attenuated measles virus. CD46 is the receptor required for measles virus entry and the viral induced cytopathic effects of cell fusion. We recently demonstrated that high expression of CD46 leads to preferential killing of cells (Anderson et al., Cancer Research, In press).

2)To develop retargeted measles viruses that are ablated for binding to its native cellular receptors, CD46 and SLAM, and which will infect and cause damage only in ovarian cancer cells and not normal cells.

3)To investigate the use of non-viral nanoparticles for cancer therapy.