Philipp Kalus

Short overview of academic career
•    2018 September – Graduation at VUB as a M.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences
•    2019 – starting as PhD candidate (promoter Prof. Joeri Aerts, FWO funded)

From a fringe discipline, immunotherapy has rapidly evolved into one of the most promising cancer treatment modalities currently available. One of the most promising is the so-called virotherapy, where the tumor specific nature of oncolytic viruses (OVs) ensures both safety and efficacy. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear that virotherapy needs to be complemented with other treatment modalities in order to unlock its full potential. One avenue that potentially synergizes with OVs is immunogenic cell death (ICD). In the recent years, the awareness of different cell death modalities and their contribution to in cancer immunotherapy has grown dramatical to the point where it is considered one of the most impactful factors dictating the outcome of antitumor immune responses.

My research aims to investigate ICD as a complementary axis to virotherapy in the model of melanoma. In this context, I study several cell death mediating genes and their downstream effect on immunogenicity of cell death in an attempt to find candidates that augment efficacy of OVs to push forward the evolution of virotherapy with the intent to come closer to a systemic, off-the shelf working cancer immunotherapy, that still takes advantage of the patients own mutations and immune system.