Lentivirus Development for Drug Delivery

Lentiviruses can efficiently infect almost all cells, and AAV vectors are delivered with high efficiency and are currently used in clinical applications for in vitro gene therapy, making them a relatively mature delivery technology. CD Formulation offers a comprehensive range of technologies to meet the diverse needs of our clients. With our professional experience and advanced viral vector design platform, we are confident to provide the best lentivirus development services to make your project a success.

What are Lentiviruses?

Lentiviruses are essentially a group of retroviruses that are able to penetrate the nuclear membrane and infect a wider range of cellular stages than other retrovirus types. The advantageous feature of lentiviruses is that they are less immunogenic than adenoviruses. Low immunogenicity means that it is difficult to trigger the immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies in the body, which affects the effectiveness of gene transfection. Lentiviruses can carry coding sequences of genes, interfering sequences, Cas9-gRNA, etc., and achieve gene regulation (overexpression, knockdown, knockout) of target genes in the organism by different injection (drug delivery) methods.

Advantages of Lentivirus

1. Long expression time, lentiviruses are the first choice for cellular experiments as they integrate exogenous genes into the host cell genome and can achieve stable expression of target genes for a long time without loss with cell division and transmission;

2. High safety, no pathogenicity has been found and has been used for CAR-T treatment in human;

3. Low immunogenicity, direct injection of living tissue is not easy to cause immune reaction, suitable for animal experiments.

Lentiviral Vector Development

• Lentiviral vector construction

Lentiviral vectors are cloned without all viral sequences except for essential cis-acting sequences. CD Formulation offers a variety of methods to optimize lentiviral vector targeting, including direct targeting, selective targeting to tissues, use of tissue-specific promoters, or control of transgene expression through miRNA-mediated silencing.

• Lentiviral cellular transduction

Lentiviruses are enveloped retroviruses that contain single-stranded RNA genomes. They originate from the retroviridae family, which use the host cell machinery to enter target cells and produce proteins and RNA components that self-assemble into infectious particles. Infection begins when the glycoprotein envelope of the virus binds to the cell. Upon entry into the host cell, decapsidation occurs, followed by reverse transcription, mediated by viral reverse transcriptase. The resulting linear double-stranded DNA is introduced into the nucleus and inserted into the genome of the host cell.

• Lentiviral vector design for inducible vector systems

Lentiviral vectors can be used for externally controlled transgene expression. Among several induction systems, the rtTA (reverse tetracycline-controlled trans-activator) regulatory system has been widely used to induce gene expression. This system uses the chimeric transcription factor tTA trans-activator, a fusion protein between bacterial TetR and herpes simplex virus VP16 activation domains, or its derivative rtTA protein, and a promoter containing a TetO binding site for tetracycline-induced gene silencing (Tet-Off) or activation (Tet-On), respectively. tet-On/Tet-Off systems have been extensively studied in the context of lentiviral vectors, where Tet regulatory systems are integrated into individual lentiviral vectors.

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