Disrupting tumor vasculature with oncolytic viruses

Abstract

Cancer is a disease caused by accumulation of phenotype-altering genetic mutations in somatic cells, which results in abnormal growth of a ected cells. Among many cancer therapies that are currently under clinical investigation, virotherapy, which uses viruses called oncolytic viruses (OVs) that specif- ically replicate in cancerous cells while sparing normal cells, has recently become one of the promising therapeutic approaches that aim to destroy cancer cells. The aim of this study is to understand the dynamics of disrupting tumor vasculature and tumor endothelium with OVs. The model is developed based on the modeling techniques that lead to a system of ordinary di erential equations (ODEs). Qualitative analysis, non-dimensionalization and stability of ODEs are performed. We also derive the steady states of the model and investigate their stability. Interestingly, our results show that there are two stable points and one non-stable point from which we found that the treatment is successful if the viral clearance rate is larger than the lysis rate. The simulations further show that oncolytic virotherapy is successful when both burst size and lysis rate are large, and fails whenever both are small.