Current Gene Therapy - Volume 16, Issue 6, 2016

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) based-therapies are currently one of the most successful strategies to treat immune disorders, cancer and infectious diseases. Vectors derived from adenoassociated virus (AAV) are very attractive to deliver the genes coding the mAbs because they allow long-term expression thus, reducing the number of administrations. They can also penetrate biological barriers such as the blood-brain-barrier to t Read More

In the past decade, miRNAs have been extensively attracted the scientist’s attentions as tumor suppressors or oncogenes that have been implicated in tumor progression, metastasis and intrinsic resistance to various cancer therapies. microRNA-21 (miR-21) demonstrates a potential oncogenic function and targets tumor inhibitor proteins in almost all types of cancer. miR-21 overexpression has been studied in terms o Read More

Gene transfer and oncolytic viruses provide new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of hematologic malignancies. However, it is still too early to introduce gene delivery or oncolytic viruses into standard clinical protocol. It is very important to discuss the obstacles that gene transfer and oncolytic virotherapy face for the further clinical application for the treatment of hematologic malignancies, and updating the adva Read More

Objective: This study was aimed to explore the potential of a non-invasive monocytes-based delivery system to transport therapeutic genes into the diseased brain. The study was conducted by first establishing the optimized conditions for lentiviral vector (LV)-mediated gene transfer into freshly isolated monocytes, followed by investigating the inflamed-brain homing efficiency and in vivo cell-mediated transgene expression by ca Read More

Background: Gene therapy in mammalian cells requires vectors exhibiting long-term stability and high expression. Episomal gene expression vectors offer a safe and attractive alternative to those that integrate into the host cell genome. Materials & Methods: In the present study, we developed a new episomal vector based on the insulator, chicken hypersensitive site 4 (cHS4). The cHS4 element was artificially synthesi Read More

Background: Oncolytic viruses such as live-attenuated, vaccine strains of measles virus (MV) have recently emerged as promising cancer treatments, having shown significant antitumor activity against a large variety of human tumors. Objective: Our study aims at determining which parameters define the sensitivity of human melanoma cells to oncolytic MV infection. Methods: We analyzed both in vitro and in vivo the Read More