Firstly we have developed and have assessed the efficacy of our technology, PeptiCRAd (Peptide-coated Conditionally Replicating Adenovirus). This technology was thought already with the intention of simplify the clinical translation particularly for personalised cancer therapies, it consists of coating the surface of an engineered oncolytic virus with tumor-specific antigens to direct the viral immune response towards the tumor immune response; in other words, the immune system of the patients gets activated by the presence of the virus, but, as the virus is covered with tumor antigens, instead of promoting a strong anti-viral response and weak anti-tumor response it promotes a strong anti-tumor response and weak anti-viral response. Importantly, PeptiCRAd does not require any genetic modification of the virus to direct the immune response towards different tumor antigens, this allows a very rapid and extremely inexpensive platforms to target different tumor types and different patients. In addition of the development of the "coating strategies" we also generated various engineered viruses with immunological active cargo to orchestrate the tumor microenvironment and make it more susceptible to the immune attack, for example we have developed a virus expressing CD40L/OX40L (to enhance the presentation of the antigens via PeptiCRAd and to activate T cells), we have also developed a virus expressing a chimeric receptor to clock PDL1 to fully unleash the efficacy of the T cell response and finally we have produced viruses with different chemokine to promote T cell infiltration in the tumor microenvironment. In parallel, as envisioned in our application, we developed different methods for the identification and for the prioritisation of the tumor antigens. In fact, we developed the immunopeptidomics technology, that was already known but it was not present in Finland, and we developed PeptiCHIP that is a unique technology for antigen discovery from a very small amount of cells, that is very compatible with real clinical setting and needle biopsies.
All these results have resulted in more than 30 original scientific papers, 7 patents, 5 licensed technologies, 2 ERC-PoC, 1 spinoff company and an ongoing clinical trial.
