Empowered Patient Podcast

Mark Bertagnolli, Chief Operating Officer at ViroMissile, has developed a modified vaccinia virus that can be delivered intravenously to seek out and destroy solid tumors throughout the body and is not dependent on a specific genetic driver of a cancer. The virus has been engineered to be resistant to the body's complement system, allowing it to survive in the bloodstream longer to infect the tumor. This action also turns the tumor microenvironment from cold to hot, signaling the immune system to attack the tumor and potentially working in combination with other treatments like PD-1 inhibitors to make them more effective. Mark explains, "ViroMissile has a modified vaccinia virus, and viruses tend to like to infect tumor cells. So the trick has been how to harness this. And we're on our third generation of virus, and we have a virus that you can inject intravenously that searches for tumors throughout the body, infects them, the body clears the rest of the virus, and the virus embeds itself in the tumors, rep