A major limitation of conventional chemotherapies used in cancer treatments today are low therapeutic indices and side effects that result from drug effects on normal tissues (off target). One of the most innovative approaches to developing antineoplastic agents with increased tumor selectivity is the use of suicide gene therapy. Suicide gene therapy involves delivering a gene product in proxim...

Low transduction efficiencies of viral and non-viral vectors still remain a major limitation in suicide gene therapy. The HSV-1 tegument protein VP22 can spread from cells where it is produced to surrounding recipient cells, thus making it a promising tool for compensation of inadequate gene transfer efficiencies. In our previous study, we focused on the optimization of the cytosine deaminase (...

Transfer and expression of suicide genes is one cornerstone of cancer gene therapy and is also considered as a proactive tool to enhance the safety of somatic transgenesis. Here we addressed whether retrovirus-mediated suicide gene therapy would result in a predictable antitumor efficiency, given that problems related to gene transfer are solved or that the suicide gene is used in a proactive a...

BACKGROUND Several studies have suggested a greater risk of suicide in Huntington disease (HD); however, unique risk factors for suicide in HD are not established. OBJECTIVE We sought to determine risk factors for suicidal behavior, defined as suicide or attempted suicide, in prodromal HD. METHODS From the prospective PREDICT-HD cohort, we identified 735 cases with HD gene expansion but no ...

Adoptive T-cell therapy can involve donor lymphocyte infusion after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, the administration of tumor infiltrating lymphocyte expanded ex-vivo, or more recently the use of T cell receptor or chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells. However, cellular therapies can pose significant risks, including graft-vs.-host-disease and other on and off-targ...

BACKGROUND Suicide and depressive disorders are strongly associated, yet not all depressed patients commit suicide. Genetic factors may partly explain this difference. We investigated whether variation at the tryptophan hydroxylase-2 (TPH2) gene and its 5' upstream region may predispose to suicide in major depressive disorder (MDD) and whether this predisposition is mediated by impulsive-aggres...

BACKGROUND Regulated expression of suicide genes is a powerful tool to eliminate specific subsets of cells and will find widespread usage in both basic and applied science. A promising example is the specific elimination of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infected cells by LTR-driven suicide genes. The success of this approach, however, depends on a fast and effective suicide gene, ...

An asd-deleted (Deltaasd) mutant of Salmonella enterica serovar Pullorum (SP) was constructed using an improved method of gene knockout by combining the pi-suicide plasmid system with the Red Disruption system. The asd gene was efficiently knocked out by the recombinant suicide vector, which replaced the asd gene with the CmR gene. Based on the balanced lethal host-vector system, the phenotype ...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the adenovirus-mediated double suicide gene (CD/TK) for selective killing of gastric cancer cells. Gastric cancer cells SCG7901 and normal gastric epithelial cell lines were infected by adenoviruses Ad-survivin/GFP and Ad-survivin/CD/TK. GFP expression and CD-TK were detected by fluorescence microscopy and reverse transcriptase polymerase chai...