For many years, my research efforts have largely focused on harnessing the lytic capacity of HSV1 to selectively destroy tumor cells. Several fronts of research have been pursued for this objective: a) generating increasingly tumor-selective HSV1 recombinants, in a iterative process almost akin to…
more drug discovery, b) combining oncolytic viral therapy with chemotherapy, and c) understanding the host response to the process of viral oncolysis. I have also been actively involved in viral and gene therapy trials in humans afflicted with malignant gliomas. In a somewhat related project, this expertise in HSV1 virology has also allowed my collaborators and I to generate the first vector that allows transfer and expression of genomic loci in primary cells in order to understand the complexity of gene regulation at the genomic level. Finally, the need to better understand the process of glioma invasion in brain has pushed me towards a new area of research in the last few years. We have been working with models of glioma invasion to understand the complexity of global genomic expression in invading glioma cells and their interaction with the environment of the brain.
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