John C. Bell

John Bell leads a laboratory in the Cancer Research Program of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, where he is listed as a senior scientist, and publishes with a University of Ottawa affiliation. In 2000 his laboratory published the experiment that explains oncolytic selectivity in one sentence: vesicular stomatitis virus, a virus exquisitely sensitive to interferon, replicated in and killed human tumour cell lines at interferon doses that completely protected normal human primary cultures, because those tumour cells had already lost the interferon response as part of becoming cancers.

The work led to the vesicular stomatitis virus and vaccinia platforms that dominate the field's pipeline, to attenuated derivatives designed to remove neurotoxicity, and to the strategy of using two different viruses in sequence so that antibodies raised against the first do not neutralise the second. He co-wrote the 2012 Nature Biotechnology review with Stephen Russell and Kah-Whye Peng that named the field's four unsolved problems: platform proliferation, the conflicting need to suppress and then unleash the immune system, poor preclinical models, and manufacturing yield.