Abstract
Purine nucleoside phosphorylase (PNP; EC 2.4.2.1) deficiency is associated with a fatal T cell immunodeficiency in children, a candidate condition for gene therapy by introduction of functional PNP sequences into either T lymphocytes or more primitive progenitor cells in the bone marrow. To test the effectiveness of PNP gene transfer in T lymphocytes, a retroviral vector (LmPSN-2) was designed and constructed to express the murine PNP cDNA under transcriptional regulation of the Moloney murine leukemia virus long terminal repeat. LmPSN-2 was first used to mediate gene transfer and expression of electrophoretically distinct murine PNP in normal (PNP-positive) human PBL. Peripheral blood leukocytes were then obtained from a PNP deficient patient and characterized phenotypically. Despite their paucity and general mitogenic unresponsiveness, T lymphocytes from this patient were successfully grown in culture by using anti-CD3 with rIL-2 and then transduced with LmPSN-2. Elevated PNP enzyme activity was observed in the transduced cell population. Mitogenic and allogeneic responses, normally depressed in PNP-deficient patients' cells, were partially corrected in the transduced cell population relative to nontransduced cells. These results suggest the possibility of effecting improved immunologic function in PNP-deficient T lymphoid cells by retroviral-mediated gene transfer as therapy for PNP deficiency.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 3006-3014 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Immunology |
Volume | 154 |
Issue number | 6 |
State | Published - 1995 |