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Review
. 2019 Mar 24;11(3):417.
doi: 10.3390/cancers11030417.

Lentiviral Vectors as Tools for the Study and Treatment of Glioblastoma

Claudia Del Vecchio  1 , Arianna Calistri  2 , Cristina Parolin  3 , Carla Mucignat-Caretta  4
Affiliations
Review

Lentiviral Vectors as Tools for the Study and Treatment of Glioblastoma

Claudia Del Vecchio et al. Cancers (Basel). .

Abstract

Glioblastoma (GBM) has the worst prognosis among brain tumors, hence basic biology, preclinical, and clinical studies are necessary to design effective strategies to defeat this disease. Gene transfer vectors derived from the most-studied lentivirus-the Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1-have wide application in dissecting GBM specific features to identify potential therapeutic targets. Last-generation lentiviruses (LV), highly improved in safety profile and gene transfer capacity, are also largely employed as delivery systems of therapeutic molecules to be employed in gene therapy (GT) approaches. LV were initially used in GT protocols aimed at the expression of suicide factors to induce GBM cell death. Subsequently, LV were adopted to either express small noncoding RNAs to affect different aspects of GBM biology or to overcome the resistance to both chemo- and radiotherapy that easily develop in this tumor after initial therapy. Newer frontiers include adoption of LV for engineering T cells to express chimeric antigen receptors recognizing specific GBM antigens, or for transducing specific cell types that, due to their biological properties, can function as carriers of therapeutic molecules to the cancer mass. Finally, LV allow the setting up of improved animal models crucial for the validation of GBM specific therapies.

Keywords: animal models; gene therapy; glioblastoma; lentiviral vectors.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overview of the main applications of lentiviruses LV in glioblastoma (GBM) research. Once transfected in appropriate cell lines, the packaging and envelope plasmids express the viral structural and enzymatic proteins (packaging vector(s)) along with the envelope glycoprotein (envelope vector) leading to the formation of viral particles that will incorporate the transgene encoding vector (transfer vector). The vesicular stomatitis virus glycoprotein G (VSV-G) is a widely employed envelope which confers to the recombinant particles the ability to infect a large range of target cells, including primary and stem cells. Additional envelopes can be adopted with the aim of restricting vector entry to cell types of interest, as explained in the text. In the context of GBM research, recombinant lentiviral particles were used in basic studies focused on tumor biology/new therapeutic target discovery, in gene and cell therapy approaches and to generate suitable animal models.
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