Cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) appear to be critical in resolving or reducing the severity of lentivirus infections. Retroviral vectors expressing the Gag/Pr or SU protein of the lentivirus equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV) were constructed and used to evaluate EIAV-specific CTL responses in horses. Three promoters, cytomegalovirus, simian virus SV40, and Moloney murine sarcoma virus (MoMSV)...

Retroviral and lentiviral based gene delivery vectors have been used in numerous pre-clinical studies and clinical trials due to their advantages, including stable and prolonged expression of therapeutic transgenes and minimal immune responses against the vector. Despite such advantages, however, retroviral vectors also have several limitations for gene therapy applications. For example, they c...

Reports on insertional "genotoxicity" in patients have created intense interest in characterizing retroviral vector integrations on the genomic level. The retroviral vector SF91m3 was used for transduction of human peripheral blood progenitor cells (PBPC). These PBPC were transplanted into nonobese diabetic/severe combined immunodeficient mice. A total of 186 retroviral vector integration sites...

Retroviral gene therapy offers immense potential to treat many genetic diseases and has already shown efficacy in clinical trials. However, retroviral vector mediated genotoxicity remains a major challenge and clinically relevant approaches to reduce integration near genes and proto-oncogenes are needed. Foamy retroviral vectors have several advantages over gammaretroviral and lentiviral vector...

Recombinant retroviral vectors are still the most common gene delivery vehicles for gene therapy purposes, especially for construction of genetically modified tumor vaccines (GMTV). However, these vehicles are characterized by relatively low titre and in the case of many tumor cell lines, low transduction efficiency. We constructed bicistronic retroviral vector pseudotypes of amphotropic murine...

We describe a novel retroviral packaging system in which high titer amphotropic retrovirus was produced without the need to generate stable producer clones. kat expression vectors, which produce high levels of retroviral vector transcripts and retroviral packaging functions, were transfected into 293 cells followed by virus harvest 48 hours posttransfection. Viral titers as high as 3.8 proviral...

Pluripotent hematopoietic stem cells (PHSC) are rare cells capable of multilineage differentiation, long-term reconstituting activity and extensive self-renewal. Such cells are the logical targets for many forms of corrective gene therapy, but are poor targets for retroviral mediated gene transfer owing to their quiescence, as retroviral transduction requires that the target cells be cycling. T...

Lentiviral vectors are more efficient at transducing quiescent hematopoietic stem cells than murine retroviral vectors. This characteristic is due to multiple karyophilic components of the lentiviral vector pre-integration complex. Lentiviral vectors are also able to carry more complex payloads than murine retroviral vectors, making it possible to deliver expression cassettes that direct either...

While recent studies have demonstrated that retroviral vectors can be used to stably express short hairpin RNA (shRNA) to inhibit gene expression, these studies have utilized replication-defective retroviruses. We describe the creation of a replication-competent, Gateway-compatible retroviral vector capable of expressing shRNA that inhibits the expression of specific genes.

In retroviral vector-mediated gene transfer, transduction efficiency can be hampered by inhibitory molecules derived from the culture fluid of virus producer cell lines. To remove these inhibitory molecules to enable better gene transduction, we had previously developed a transduction method using a fibronectin fragment-coated vessel (i.e., the RetroNectin-bound virus transduction method). In t...