Modeling, simulation and prediction of protein structures for the design of oncolytic viruses

One of the main problems in the fight against cancer is represented by the immunosuppression it causes. Several research lines have been undertaken to address this issue; one of the most promising is represented by oncolytic viruses. Oncolytic viruses are designed from live attenuated recombinant viruses and are designed to preferentially infect cancer cells, within which they replicate causing their lysis and enhance, through various mechanisms, innate and adaptive immunity. In collaboration with the Etna Biotech company, which was involved in designing five protein constructs composed of five different variants of a monoclonal antibody linked to a viral surface protein, we worked on the modeling and evaluation of these proteins associated with the Measles Virus. The software we used was Swiss-model (https://swissmodel.expasy.org/), a bioinformatics webserver dedicated to homology modeling of 3D protein structures, and Pro-Q (https://proq.bioinfo.se/ProQ/ProQ.html) to perform quality control. We shared our results with the company, which completed laboratory tests for two of the five constructs, confirming our predictions. Transfection experiments are currently underway with two other constructs, while the last one has not yet been subjected to such investigations.