Sarah Vanbellingen

Short overview of academic career
•    Graduated at VUB in 2020 as a pharmacist (MSc drug discovery and development);
•    PhD student at NAVI since November 2020 under supervision of prof. Joeri Aerts.

Over the past decade, immunotherapy gained a lot of importance as a treatment for cancer. However, the currently existing immunotherapies all have important downsides. A relatively new, very promising kind of immunotherapy is oncolytic virotherapy, which can induce tumor specific immune responses. Oncolytic viruses are naturally occurring or genetically modified to selectively replicate within tumor cells. This characteristic can be exploited by using them to deliver transgenes solely to the tumor microenvironment, thereby minimizing safety concerns.

The objective of my PhD project is to develop a system to selectively knockout CD59 on melanoma cells to release complement-dependent cytotoxicity and to integrate this system into an oncolytic virus to investigate a potential synergy on immunogenic cell death. Eventually, it would be interesting to study the combination of this approach with checkpoint inhibitors of an IgG1 isotype.