Personalized Oncolytic Therapy: The Next Step Toward the Successful Clinical Application of Vaccine-Strain Measles Viruses for Cancer Therapy?

Our plain-English summary of Personalized Oncolytic Therapy: The Next Step Toward the Successful Clinical Application of Vaccine-Strain Measles Viruses for Cancer Therapy?, by T. Peikert (Journal of Thoracic Oncology, 2020).

The study

• Author: T. Peikert
• Journal: Journal of Thoracic Oncology
• Published: 2020;15(5):689-691
• Type of article: Editorial, Comment
• Cited by: 1 article, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This was an editorial in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology commenting on a study by Delaunay et al. published in the same issue; the author reported no original data. The editorial reviewed the background of measles virus (MV) as a cancer therapy, from an anecdotal 1949 report of Hodgkin's lymphoma regression after MV infection to differences between wild-type and live-attenuated vaccine-strain MV, and noted that clinical responses in trials have been variable, with stable disease the best response reported in ovarian cancer and malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM). Summarising Delaunay et al., the author wrote that 36% of established MPM cell lines (8 of 22) had homozygous deletion of IFNB1, that among 80 short-term MPM cultures 71% had HD-CDKN2A and 23% HD-IFNB1, and that these changes appeared in 43.8% and 9.2% of 86 MPM cases in The Cancer Genome Atlas. The author concluded that personalizing MV therapy is interesting but "not yet ready for clinical application".

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Editorial commentary on a research article published in the same journal issue; no original data collected
• Who was studied: No population studied by the author; the editorial discusses mesothelioma cell lines, short-term cultures and Cancer Genome Atlas cases reported by Delaunay et al., plus earlier trials in multiple myeloma, glioma, ovarian cancer and malignant pleural mesothelioma
• Exposure: Not an exposure study; the intervention discussed is oncolytic vaccine-strain measles virus therapy (including virus carrying the human sodium iodine symporter), and possible combination with JAK1/2 inhibition
• Main results:
  • As reported by the editorial from Delaunay et al.: 36% of established MPM cell lines (8 of 22) had homozygous deletion of IFNB1 (HD-IFNB1)
  • As reported from Delaunay et al.: among 80 short-term MPM cultures, 71% had HD-CDKN2A and 23% HD-IFNB1; in 86 MPM cases in The Cancer Genome Atlas, these were present in 43.8% and 9.2% respectively
  • As reported from Delaunay et al.: HD-IFNB1 was more frequent in biphasic (45%) and sarcomatoid or desmoplastic (50%) MPM tumors
  • As reported from Delaunay et al.: knocking out IFNB1 reversed measles virus resistance in only one of four MV-resistant MPM cell lines, indicating heterogeneous resistance mechanisms
  • The editorial states that for MPM, preexisting and boosted anti-MV antibodies were reported by the author's group as a major barrier to MV tumor cell infection
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that personalizing measles virus therapy is an interesting concept but is not yet ready for clinical use, and that future success will likely require combination approaches addressing neutralizing antibodies, viral infection and replication, and virally induced antitumor immunity
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The author notes that HD-IFNB1 is not the only interferon-pathway abnormality determining measles virus susceptibility, so testing for it may be less useful than in vitro infection of short-term tumor cell cultures
  • The author notes that clinical response data for measles virus therapy have been mixed, with stable disease the best response in nonhematologic malignancies

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer, Mesothelioma.

Related studies

• Frequent Homozygous Deletions of Type I Interferon Genes in Pleural Mesothelioma Confer Sensitivity to Oncolytic Measles Virus — T. Delaunay, C. Achard, et al. (2020)
• Oncolytic Viral Therapy for Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma — H. Yang, D. Xu, et al. (2020)
• Reply to: Oncolytic Viral Therapy for Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma — D. Jean, T. Delaunay, et al. (2020)
• Oncolytic measles viruses encoding interferon beta and the thyroidal sodium iodide symporter gene for mesothelioma virotherapy — H. Li, K.W. Peng, et al. (2010)
• Clinical Trials with Oncolytic Measles Virus: Current Status and Future Prospects — P. Msaouel, M. Opyrchal, et al. (2018)
• Antitumor-specific T-cell responses induced by oncolytic adenovirus ONCOS-102 (AdV5/3-D24-GM-CSF) in peritoneal mesothelioma mouse model — L. Kuryk, A.W. Møller, et al. (2018)

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