REVIEW ARTICLE


Engineering Oncolytic Vaccinia Viruses for Non-Invasive Optical Imaging of Tumors



Béla Dénes1, 2, Nadja Fodor1, Andre Obenaus3, István Fodor1, 4, *
1 Center for Health Disparities and Molecular Medicine, Loma Linda University
2 Central Veterinary Institute, Budapest, Hungary
3 Department of Radiation Medicine, Loma Linda University and
4 Department of Biochemistry & Microbiology, Loma Linda University, 11085 Campus St., Loma Linda, CA 92354, USA


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Creative Commons License
© 2008 Dénes et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Biochemistry & Microbiology, Loma Linda University, 11085 Campus St., Loma Linda, CA 92354, USA; E-mail: ifodor@llu.edu


Abstract

Attenuated vaccinia viruses (VV) selectively replicate in malignant cells and confer oncolytic effect in vivo. Here we demonstrate that oncolytic VV may also be used as a diagnostic agent for tumor-bearing mice. A series of recombinant vaccinia viruses has been constructed expressing optical reporters to mediate emission of bioluminescent and fluorescent light which can be visualized. Data show that following systemic virus delivery the developing tumors can be non-invasively visualized in mice in vivo. Renilla luciferase and Aquoria GFP have been effective in imaging xenografted PC-3 prostate and orthotopic MB-49 bladder tumors. Brighter reporters, Gaussia luciferase and Renilla GFP have been used for imaging TRAMP prostate cancer and C6 subcutaneous model of glioma. The C6 imaging data have been corroborated by traditional MRI. We are also developing a VV-mediated system for tumor detection in far red or near infra red fluorescent light. Results suggest that VV-mediated imaging is a promising alternative for early diagnosis of various human cancers.