Immunological Effects and Viral Gene Expression Determine the Efficacy of Oncolytic Measles Vaccines Encoding IL-12 or IL-15 Agonists.

Tumor-targeted immunomodulation using oncolytic viral vectors is currently being investigated as a promising strategy in cancer therapy. In a previous study, we showed that a measles virus Schwarz vaccine strain (MeVac) vector encoding an interleukin-12 fusion protein (FmIL-12) is an effective immunotherapy in the MC38cea murine colon adenocarcinoma model. We hypothesized that MeVac encoding interleukin-15 may mediate enhanced T and NK cell responses and thus increase the therapeutic efficacy, especially in NK cell-controlled tumors.