Interleukin-12 (IL-12) is a potent cytokine that may be harnessed to treat cancer. To date, nearly 100 IL-12-based clinical trials have been initiated worldwide. Yet systemic administration of IL-12 is toxic. Different strategies are being developed to reduce such toxicities by restricting IL-12 distribution. Our previous studies employed lentivector-mediated expression of murine IL-12 in tumor...

Development of gene transfer vectors with regulated, lung-specific expression will be a useful tool for studying lung biology and developing gene therapies. In this study we constructed a series of lentiviral vectors with regulatory elements predicted to produce lung-specific transgene expression: the surfactant protein C promoter (SPC) for alveolar epithelial type II cell (AECII) expression, t...

Prion disease refers to a group of fatal transmissible neurodegenerative diseases for which no pharmacological treatment is available. The cellular prion protein (PrP(C)) is required for both prion replication and pathogenesis, and reducing PrP(C) levels has been shown to extend survival time after prion infection. RNA interference (RNAi) is a sequence-specific posttranscriptional gene silencin...

6. McKee, TD, Grandi, P, Mok, W, Alexandrakis, G, Insin, N, Zimmer, JP et al. (2006). Degradation of fi brillar collagen in a human melanoma xenograft improves the effi cacy of an oncolytic herpes simplex virus vector. Cancer Res 66: 2509–2513. 7. Wang, Y, Hallden, G, Hill, R, Anand, A, Liu, TC, Francis, J et al. (2003). E3 gene manipulations affect oncolytic adenovirus activity in immunocompet...

To make human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-based vectors safer for use in the research and clinical setting, a significant modification to the HIV-1 genome has been the deletion of promoter and enhancer elements from the U3 region of the long terminal repeat (LTR). Vectors containing this deletion are thought to have no LTR-directed transcription and are called self-inactivating (SIN) ...

in vitro, specifically decreasing GLI1 messenger RNA (mRNA) levels, at concentrations ranging from 1 to 10mM showing dose-dependent effects, modulated by serum levels. The best tests for specificity rely on mimicry by targeting SMOH with RNA interference (RNAi), the use of insensitive SMOH mutants and pathway epistatic analyses. Targeting SMOH through lentivector-mediated short hairpin RNA (shR...