Adeno-associated virus and other potential vectors for angiostatin and endostatin gene therapy.

Abstract

Recently, evidence has gathered that inhibiting angiogenesis, the process by which new vessels are generated from existing ones, may have significant advantages over conventional cancer chemotherapy, including nontoxicity, lack of drug resistance, and broadspectrum efficacy against tumors of varied origins. To date, the demonstration of these benefits has relied solely on the administration of purified anti-angiogenic proteins into mouse models. A major hindrance to the clinical applicability of anti-angiogenic proteins lies in the current lack of the means to generate and administer these proteins in large enough quantities to achieve an effective dose over the lengths of time that would be needed to keep tumors suppressed in human subjects. Gene transfer using the appropriate vector may offer a single modality which can both generate and simply administer these proteins over the entire course needed to achieve anti-angiogenic cancer therapy.