An Agent-Based Model of Combination Oncolytic Viral Therapy and Anti-PD-1 Immunotherapy Reveals the Importance of Spatial Location When Treating Glioblastoma

Simple Summary</p> A combination of oncolytic viral therapy and immunotherapy provides an alternative option to the standard of care for treating the lethal brain tumor glioblastoma (GBM). Although this combination therapy shows promise, there are many unknown questions regarding how the tumor landscape and spatial dosing strategies impact the effectiveness of the treatment. Our study aims to shed light on these questions using a novel spatially explicit computational model of GBM response to treatment. Our results suggest that oncolytic viral dosing in the location of highest tumor cell density leads to substantial tumor size reduction over viral dosing in the center of the tumor. These results can help to inform future clinical trials and more effective treatment strategies for oncolytic viral therapy in GBM patients.</p> Oncolytic viral therapies and immunotherapies are of growing clinical interest due to their selectivity for tumor cells over healthy cells and their immunostimulatory properties. These treatment modalities provide promising alternatives to the standard of care, particularly for cancers with poor prognoses, such as the lethal brain tumor glioblastoma (GBM). However, uncertainty remains regarding optimal dosing strategies, including how the spatial location of viral doses impacts therapeutic efficacy and tumor landscape characteristics that are most conducive to producing an effective immune response. We develop a three-dimensional agent-based model (ABM) of GBM undergoing treatment with a combination of an oncolytic Herpes Simplex Virus and an anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. We use a mechanistic approach to model the interactions between distinct populations of immune cells, incorporating both innate and adaptive immune responses to oncolytic viral therapy and including a mechanism of adaptive immune suppression via the PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint pathway. We utilize the spatially explicit nature of the ABM to determine optimal viral dosing in both the temporal and spatial contexts. After proposing an adaptive viral dosing strategy that chooses to dose sites at the location of highest tumor cell density, we find that, in most cases, this adaptive strategy produces a more effective treatment outcome than repeatedly dosing in the center of the tumor.</p>