John Bell ‘77

Dr. Bell has built an international reputation for his work on identifying and characterizing certain types of animal viruses that specifically infect and kill cancer cells, giving them potential for use as cancer therapeutic agents. These so–called oncolytic viruses hold promise as treatments of various human cancers and as inoculations against certain types of cancer. In a ten–year period, Dr. Bell registered 18 patents related to this technology and delivered invited talks around the world including at the Mayo Clinic, the Yale University School of Medicine, Busan National University in Korea and in Cork, Ireland at the European Society of Gene Therapy.

Dr. Bell heads the Canadian Oncolytic Virus Consortium, an alliance that connects Canadian research groups working on developing virus–based cancer therapeutics. He is also the director of the Biotherapeutics Program for the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. In the private sector, he co–founded Jennerex Biotherapeutics, a biotechnology company that is developing an oncolytic vaccinia virus as a new therapeutic technique to treat cancers.