Ashley Ballou

Glioblastoma brain cancer tumors are the most common and aggressive brain tumors an adult can get. Currently, these tumors are incurable using today’s cancer treatments, leading researchers toward different strategies. One new treatment strategy researchers have been using is creating vaccines through virally infected brain tumor cells that are injected beneath the skin. The Zika virus has shown to be an effective vaccine for this use, but given its potential for adverse effects, we turned to the adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vector for the zika virus envelope instead. This research looked to see if AAV could effectively infect glioblastoma tumor cells. Through the use of cell culture and AAV viral infection of different concentrations, including a control culture that wasn’t infected, we were able to see if the cells were infected via immunocytochemistry (ICC) methods. We did two sets of ICC imaging and the first set looked promising, but we were unable to recreate the results in the second set. This indicates that AAV can’t infect tumor cells, though we will be recreating the experiment with a positive control to compare ICC stains to. We will also do PCR with the AAV-infected and control cell samples as another way of infection confirmation. Through these next steps, we will either confirm our findings that AAV cannot infect tumor cells effectively, or find evidence that AAV can infect glioblastoma tumor cells.