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The host response: adaptive immune response to viral vector delivery

Published on August 5, 2014   41 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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0:00
My name is Roland Herzog. I'm a professor at the University of Florida Department of Pediatrics at the Powell Gene Therapy Center where we are developing gene therapies for genetic disease using viral vectors to transfer our therapeutic genes. One of the key questions that we're addressing in my laboratory is what do we have to do to avoid rejection of our therapy by the immune system? So understanding the adaptive immune response to viral gene transfer is key for sustained therapy and successful delivery of our genes.
0:42
The concept of viral gene transfer is quite simple. We use recombinant viruses which we engineered to contain a therapeutic gene that could correct a genetic defect. Viruses have evolved to effectively infect a variety of cell types. So we can choose and design these viral vectors to infect a certain type of cells and express our therapeutic gene in those cells.
1:12
However, a potential complication of this approach is that the immune system has evolved to fend off versus and to recognize viruses as invading pathogens. Shown here is an example of a muscle fiber, shown in red, which expresses a gene that we transferred in using a viral vector. And this cell is being surrounded by these green cells, which are cytotoxic T lymphocytes-- CD8 positive T cells that attack and destroy this muscle fiber. So in this case, the immune system has rejected our therapy.

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The host response: adaptive immune response to viral vector delivery

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