Evaluating LOAd703 in combination with chemotherapeutic agents in ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancer is a disease with a high rate of mortality where the need for novel treatments will increase in the near future as older and populous generations reach the age where the cancer is usually diagnosed. Once treated, ovarian cancer tends to recur and display a newfound resistance against the platinum-based chemotherapeutic drugs that are used to treat the disease. Therefore, devising new methods of treatment is of utmost importance. Treatment with oncolytic viruses like LOAd703 offers an alternative treatment option that is more specific, causes immunogenic cell death in tumor cells, can stimulate the patient’s own immune system into fighting the cancer, and also has the potential to induce long term immune memory. In this project, the oncolytic and immunogenic capacity of LOAd703 in three different ovarian cancer cell lines was tested in conjunction with the standard-of-care chemotherapeutical drugs paclitaxel, cisplatin and carboplatin. The chemotherapy did not inhibit the replication, transgene expression or oncolysis of the LOAd703 virus. LOAd703 was able to effectively induce oncolysis in all three cell lines. The oncolytic capacity was generally increased when combined with chemotherapeutics. In cells resistant to chemotherapeutics, combination therapy with LOAd703 increased the killing capacity. While combination therapy proved effective, it did leave behind a small population of tumor cells that appeared to be resistant to both chemotherapy and viral oncolysis but longer culturing times may be tested to evaluate if complete killing will occur or if it is a primary resistance to these treatments in the cell lines. Further, if there is resistance to oncolysis or chemotherapy-mediated killing, employing tumor-immune cell co-cultures or in vivo studies might be necessary in order to assess whether the immunostimulatory effects of LOAd703 will lead to a complete eradication of the remaining tumor cells. The treatments also caused an increase in the expression of certain cell surface markers, like PD-L1 and CD262, which might open the door for future trials combining chemotherapy and LOAd703 with anti-PD-L1 inhibitors or soluble TRAIL