Malignant gliomas are the most frequent primary brain tumors and have a dismal prognosis due to their infiltrative growth. Gene therapy using viral vectors represents an attractive alternative to conventional cancer therapies. In a previous study, we established lentiviral vectors pseudotyped with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) glycoproteins (GPs) and demonstrated transduction of hum...

There is increasing trend in using recombinant stem cells as novel therapeutic candidates in different diseases. These studies encompass different applications from targeted homing of Mesenchymal Stromal (stem) Cells (MSC), to arming them with different cytokines. Resistance to transfection or transduction methods had urged researchers to look for better gene delivery alternates and optimizing ...

Lentivirus-based gene delivery vectors carrying multiple gene cassettes are powerful tools in gene transfer studies and gene therapy, allowing coexpression of multiple therapeutic factors and, if desired, fluorescent reporters. Current strategies to express transgenes and microRNA (miRNA) clusters from a single vector have certain limitations that affect transgene expression levels and/or vecto...

lentiviral vectors are among the promising viral based-vectors in gene therapy applications, but the efficiency of their targeting needs to be improved. (strept)avidin-biotin adaptor system is a novel approach to modify the lentiviral envelope for better targeting properties. herein, we describe utilization of this adaptor system by designing a candidate envelope protein-bearing biotin acceptor...

Lentiviral vectors (LV) are efficient vehicles for gene transfer in mammalian cells due to their capacity to stably express a gene of interest in non-dividing and dividing cells. Their use has exponentially grown in the last years both in research and in gene therapy protocols, reaching 12% of the viral vector based clinical trials in 2011 [1]. This chapter reviews and discusses the state of th...

We compared the efficiency of transduction by an HIV-1-based lentiviral vector to that by a Moloney murine leukemia virus (MLV) retroviral vector, using stringent in vitro assays of primitive, quiescent human hematopoietic progenitor cells. Each construct contained the enhanced green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a reporter gene. The lentiviral vector, but not the MLV vector, expressed GFP in no...