Ya-Fang Mei Lab

Adenovirus vectors based on Ad5 have been successfully used as gene transfer vectors in many gene therapy clinical trials. Despite their widespread application, many potential therapeutic applications are limited by the prevalence of vector-neutralizing antibodies within the human population and inability of Ad5-based vectors to transduce important therapeutic target cell types.

In an attempt to circumvent these problems, we selected using a novel oncolytic adenovirus 11p virus as vectors, since the prevalence of neutralizing antibodies is low. Replication-competent Ad5 vectors expressing therapeutic genes from the E3 region were evaluated but few reports have described with insertions at the E1 region in the full viral genome. Fortunately, we developed fully replication competent adenovirus 11p vectors (RCAd11p) with E1 insertions: expressing suicide genes, cytokine genes or tumor suppressing genes.

Our project focuses on the investigation of the RCAd11p vectors tumor-killing efficacy in vitro and in vivo; and study the molecular mechanisms of the vectors in tumor cells. Our goal is to apply the Ad11p based vectors in clinical trials for the treatment of solid tumors.