Cancer frenemy pathways: Inducing immunogenic cell death by exploiting apoptosis-interferon antagonism with oncolytic viruses

Description

Vladimir Bozhdansky, Eran Bacharach, and Marcelo Ehrlich published a 2026 perspective on turning cancer's own survival programs against it. They use the idea of a frenemy pathway, a biological program that protects healthy tissue yet also helps tumors, creating weaknesses that treatment can exploit. Their focus is the tug-of-war between apoptosis, orderly cell suicide, and type I interferon signaling, the alarm system that summons immune attack.

Oncolytic viruses, engineered to infect cancer cells, sit at the center of the argument. By disturbing the balance between cell death and interferon defenses, a virus might force tumor cells into immunogenic death, the kind that trains the immune system to hunt remaining cancer. The authors frame this as synthetic lethality at the level of whole pathways rather than single genes.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13233725