Oncolytic Virotherapy: Tumor Lysis & In Situ Vaccination

This simulator renders a 3D tumor spheroid of ~170 cells and lets you inject an engineered oncolytic virus at its core. Infected cells (yellow) run down a lytic timer before bursting, releasing new virions that spread to neighboring healthy cells (green) and tumor antigens that accumulate in an antigen pool. That pool recruits T cells (blue) into the spheroid, which kill both infected cells and — critically — uninfected bystander cells nearby, modeling the "in situ vaccination" effect that turns direct viral oncolysis into a systemic anti-tumor immune response. Tune infectivity, the lytic period, immune priming rate and T-cell kill rate to see the tumor cleared by pure viral lysis, by immune-mediated bystander killing, or not at all if the virus burns out before priming enough T cells.