Right tool for the job

While regulatory concerns over the use of adenoviral vectors in gene therapy trials have received wide attention, the targeted use of such vectors in appropriate indications may have advantages over other therapeutic approaches. For example, researchers at Yale University have published results suggesting that adenoviral-encoded immunoconjugates could be useful to treat cancer. The immunoconjugates were targeted to tumors and tumor vasculature, and may require adenoviral delivery to achieve their therapeutic effect.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alan Garen and colleagues at Yale last week described the use of replication-incompetent adenoviral vectors encoding the Fc region of IgG1 conjugated to a tumor targeting domain, such as Factor VII. Factor VII binds to tissue factor, a protein expressed by both tumor cells and vascular endothelial cells, targeting both the tumor and its existing blood supply for destruction by the immune system. In a mouse model of human melanoma, intratumoral injection of the adenovirus caused regression of metastatic tumors as well as the injected tumor without causing damage to normal organs...