Polymers for Improving the In Vivo Transduction Efficiency of AAV2 Vectors

Background: Adeno-associated virus has attracted great attention as vehicle for body-wide gene delivery. However, for the successful treatment of a disease such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy infusion of very large amounts of vectors is required. This not only raises questions about the technical feasibility of the large scale production but also about the overall safety of the approach. One way to overcome these problems would be to find strategies able to increase the in vivo efficiency. Methodology: Here, we investigated whether polymers can act as adjuvants to increase the in vivo efficiency of AAV2. Our strategy consisted in the pre-injection of polymers before intravenous administration of mice with AAV2 encoding a murine secreted alkaline phosphatase (mSeAP). The transgene expression, vector biodistribution and tissue transduction were studied by quantification of the mSeAP protein and real time PCR. The injection of polyinosinic acid and polylysine resulted in an increase of plasmatic mSeAP of 2- and 12-fold, respectively. Interestingly, polyinosinic acid pre-injection significantly reduced the neutralizing antibody titer raised against AAV2. Conclusions: Our results show that the pre-injection of polymers can improve the overall transduction efficiency of systemically administered AAV2 and reduce the humoral response against the capsid proteins

Mechanistic Insights into the Enhancement of Adeno-Associated Virus Transduction by Proteasome Inhibitors

Proteasome inhibitors (e.g., bortezomib, MG132) are known to enhance adeno-associated virus (AAV) transduction; however, whether this results from pleotropic proteasome inhibition or off-target serine and/or cysteine protease inhibition remains unresolved. Here, we examined recombinant AAV (rAAV) effects of a new proteasome inhibitor, carfilzomib, which specifically inhibits chymotrypsin-like proteasome activity and no other proteases. We determined that proteasome inhibitors act on rAAV through proteasome inhibition and not serine or cysteine protease inhibition, likely through positive changes late in transduction