The Inside Out of Lentiviral Vectors

The Inside Out of Lentiviral Vectors

Lentiviruses induce a wide variety of pathologies in different animal species. A common feature of the replicative cycle of these viruses is their ability to target non-dividing cells, a property that constitutes an extremely attractive asset in gene therapy. In this review, we shall describe the main basic aspects of the virology of lentiviruses that were exploited to obtain efficient gene tra...

Beta thalassemia gene therapy using lentiviral vectors

Recent years, allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) has proved to be the successful cure for patients with thalassemia major, however this is restricted due to limited matched-related donor. Its complications include chronic graft-versus-host disease in 5-8% of patients. So, a molecular approach, such as gene therapy for direct normal beta globin gene transmission, seems quite promising ...

Biosafety of lentiviral vectors.

The characteristics of lentiviral vectors (stable integration in non-dividing and dividing cells, long-term expression of the transgene, absence of immune response) make them ideal gene transfer vehicula for future gene therapy. However, the most potent lentiviral vectors are derived from highly pathogenic human viruses, such as HIV. We describe how the field has engineered lentivectors with in...

Lentiviral Vectors in Immunotherapy

Lentiviral transgene vectors

Transgenic animals can be broadly defined as animals that contain recombinant DNA molecules in their genome that have been introduced by human intervention (Wall, 1996). Developmental studies and clinically relevant disease models are based on transgenic laboratory animals, most commonly the mouse. In farm animals, transgenic technology is used to produce large quantities of pharmaceutically re...