Treatment Expands Potential For Using Vaccinia Virus In Therapy, Vaccines.(Brief Article)

2001 DEC 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - Using new treatments designed to inactivate vaccinia virus (VV), medical investigators can expand the scope of gene therapy investigations.

So say researchers at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California, who have studied vaccinia viruses inactivated with psoralen/ultraviolet (PUV) treatments.

"Although the first studies on PUV-inactivated VV (PUV-VV) for the delivery of suicide or cytokine genes to cancer cells were promising, the efficiency and kinetics of exogenous gene expression have not been fully evaluated," T.M. Timiryasova and colleagues stated in the Journal of Gene Medicine.

The researchers believed incorporating tumor suppressor genes into PUV-VV would expand the potential uses for these viruses in gene therapies.

Testing their theory, the group constructed PUV-VV vectors expressing luciferase (luc) genes or p53 tumor suppressor genes (VV-TK-53).

According to Timiryasova and coworkers, both vectors effectively infected glioma cells, expressing the respective genes as expected. For as long as a week, p53 protein production could be detected in the VV-TK-53 treated glioma cells (Replication-deficient vaccinia virus gene therapy vector: Evaluation of exogenous gene expression mediated by PUV-inactivated virus in glioma cells, J Gene Med, 2001;3(5):468-477).

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