REVIEW ARTICLE
Engineering Oncolytic Vaccinia Viruses for Non-Invasive Optical Imaging of Tumors
Béla Dénes1, 2, Nadja Fodor1, Andre Obenaus3, István Fodor1, 4, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 252
Last Page: 261
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-2-252
DOI: 10.2174/1874070700802010252
Article History:
Received Date: 29/07/2008Revision Received Date: 06/11/2008
Acceptance Date: 13/11/2008
Electronic publication date: 12/12/2008
Collection year: 2008
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.
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.