IFNA1 and cancer: This intuitively increases the specificity of the modified viruses towards cancerous cells via exploiting the cancer cell’s constantly active replicative pathway; b) deactivation of viral immuno-evasion: Viruses have pathways of evading the human immune response, an example of this is the B18R protein of vaccinia viruses which acts as a decoy receptor for interferon-α (IFN-α), preventing the IFN-α signaling cascade from inhibiting viral functions (Kim et al., 2017).