Aside from the traditional small-molecule chemotherapeutics or targeted therapy agents that have been widely used in the clinic for decades, a new type of cancer therapeutics based on oncolytic viruses has recently gained attention in the field of research. Oncolytic viruses are genetically modified viruses capable of delivering therapeutic gene payload to cancer cells.
There are many types of oncolytic viruses each having a different tumor-targeting mechanism. This application note highlights using Sindbis pseudovirus genetically modified with firefly luciferase reporter gene to non-invasively evaluate, monitor, and quantify oncolytic viral infection in living tumors and subsequent virus-host interactions in real-time using IVIS® optical imaging.