The use of high-frequency ultrasound imaging and biofluorescence for in vivoevaluation of gene therapy vectors

BMC Medical Imaging

Research Article

Nigel Scott¹  Gemma Marston²  Ian M Carr²  Alexander F Markham²  P Louise Coletta²  Nicola Ingram²  Stuart A Macnab³  Adrian Whitehouse³ 

[1] Department of Histopathology, Bexley Wing, St James’s University Hospital, LS9 7TF, Leeds, UK;School of Medicine, University of Leeds Brenner Building, St James’s University Hospital, LS9 7TF, Leeds, UK;School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Faculty of Biological Sciences and Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK;

关键词: Biofluorescence;    Ultrasound;    Gene therapy;    Imaging;    Multi-modal;    Colorectal cancer;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2342-13-35

 received in 2013-02-01, accepted in 2013-11-01,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundNon-invasive imaging of the biodistribution of novel therapeutics including gene therapy vectors in animal models is essential.MethodsThis study assessed the utility of high-frequency ultrasound (HF-US) combined with biofluoresence imaging (BFI) to determine the longitudinal impact of a Herpesvirus saimiri amplicon on human colorectal cancer xenograft growth.ResultsHF-US imaging of xenografts resulted in an accurate and informative xenograft volume in a longitudinal study. The volumes correlated better with final ex vivo volume than mechanical callipers (R2 = 0.7993, p = 0.0002 vs. R2 = 0.7867, p = 0.0014). HF-US showed that the amplicon caused lobe formation. BFI demonstrated retention and expression of the amplicon in the xenografts and quantitation of the fluorescence levels also correlated with tumour volumes.ConclusionsThe use of multi-modal imaging provided useful and enhanced insights into the behaviour of gene therapy vectors in vivo in real-time. These relatively inexpensive technologies are easy to incorporate into pre-clinical studies.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Ingram et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013