Combining DC-mediated immunotherapy with oncolytic virotherapy in the treatment of HGG

Oncolytic viruses (OV) are either naturally selective for neoplastic cells or are engineered to be so. Whereas conservative therapies use the unspecific genome vulnerability of highly proliferating cells to target malignancies, OV have the advantage of often being extremely specific in infecting tumor cells. This (intrinsic) selectivity combined with the demonstrated safety and lack of host toxicity in phase I clinical studies make OV very appealing as novel cancer therapeutics. Recently, Alkassar et al. have shown in vitro and in vivo that naturally occurring Reovirus, Parvovirus and Newcastle disease virus (ND…