Synthetic virology approaches to improve the safety and efficacy of oncolytic virus therapies

Generation of a rapamycin-inducible expression system in an oncolytic vaccinia virus vector

We designed a series of chemogenetic switches to enable temporal control of the expression of multiple therapeutic payloads. Vaccinia virus (VV) is a cytoplasmic virus and while is able to infect and replicate in mammalian cells, its transcriptional machinery and genomic structure is not optimized for the use of mammalian promoters. Vaccinia virus has its own set of regulatory sequences and transcription factors that are adapted to its specific needs, and the use of mammalian promoters is not…