PURPOSE To establish a novel, targeted lentivirus-based HSV-tk (herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase)/GCV (ganciclovir) gene therapy system to inhibit lens epithelial cell proliferation for treatment of posterior capsular opacification (PCO) after cataract surgery. METHODS An enhanced Cre recombinase (Cre/loxP) system with a lentiviral vector expressing Cre under the control of the lens-spec...

Bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) contributes significantly to health-related economic losses in the beef and dairy industry. Antibodies of maternal origin can be protective against BVDV infection, however, calves with low titres of maternal antibody or that do not receive colostrum may be at risk for acute BVDV infection. Interference by high titres of maternal antibodies prevents the develo...

Objective(s): Neural stem/progenitor cells (NS/PCs) hold a great potential for delivery of therapeutic agents into the injured regions of the brain. Efficient gene delivery using NS/PCs may correct a genetic defect, produce therapeutic proteins or neurotransmitters, and modulate enzyme activation. Here, we investigated the efficiency of a recombinant lentivirus vector ...

Efficient gene delivery in the central nervous system (CNS) is important in studying gene functions, modeling neurological diseases and developing therapeutic approaches. Lentiviral vectors are attractive tools in transduction of neurons and other cell types in CNS as they transduce both dividing and non-dividing cells, support sustained expression of transgenes, and have relatively large packa...

Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) plays a key role in bovine respiratory disease complex, which can lead to pneumonia, diarrhea and death of calves. Current vaccines are not very effective due, in part, to immunosuppressive traits and failure to induce broad protection. There are diverse BVDV strains and thus, current vaccines contain representative genotype 1 and 2 viruses (BVDV-1 & 2) to bro...

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) are able to migrate to tumor vasculature. These cells, if genetically modified, can be used as vehicles to deliver toxic material to, or express anticancer proteins in tumor. To test this hypothesis, we developed several single, endothelial-specific, and doxycycline-inducible self-inactivating (SIN) lentiviral vectors. Two distinct expression cassettes were in...

Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) can cause lifelong persistent infection. One reason for the phenomena is attributed to BVDV infection to placenta tissue. However the mechanisms that BVDV invades into placenta tissue remain unclear. To clarify the molecular mechanisms, we investigated the possible means that BVDV entered into bovine trophoblast cells (TPC). Yeast two-hybrid system was used to...

Local gene therapy could be a therapeutic option for ovarian carcinoma, a life-threatening malignancy, because of disease containment within the peritoneal cavity in most patients. Lentiviral vectors, which are potentially capable of stable transgene expression, may be useful to vehicle therapeutic molecules requiring long-term production in these tumors. To investigate this concept, we used le...

BACKGROUND Therapeutic gene transfer is currently being evaluated as a potential therapy for inflammatory bowel disease. This study investigates the safety and therapeutic benefit of a locally administered lentiviral vector encoding murine interleukin-10 in altering the onset and relapse of dextran sodium sulfate induced murine colitis. METHODS Lentiviral vectors encoding the reporter genes f...

A lentiviral vector capable of expressing the HIV-1 vpr gene (Vpr lentiviral vector) was constructed, and its in vivo anticancer effect was determined against cutaneous tumors derived from the AT-84 oral cancer cells in immunocompetent mice. A single intratumoral injection of the Vpr lentiviral vector not only significantly reduced the primary tumor volume but also completely regressed tumors i...