Targeted Gene Therapy of Cancer
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Pathology, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2022) | Viewed by 16323
Special Issue Editor
Interests: cancer targeted therapies; bacteriophage gene delivery; gene therapy; cancer immunotherapy; vaccine delivery
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Gene therapy offers a potential treatment strategy against cancer and has been attempted for many decades, with most of clinical trials (67%) of gene therapy are designed to treat cancer. However, progress has been hindered mostly by lack of tumor-selective vectors efficient via clinical systemic routes. Systemic administration of a vector, illustrating safe, efficient, and targeted gene delivery to tumors has proven to be a major challenge. Local delivery can be used but wider clinical benefit requires systemic administration of gene therapy. For instance, treatment of metastatic cancer, responsible for as much as 90% of cancer-related deaths, is heavily reliant upon systemically administered therapeutics. Gene therapy has been further hampered by problems with repeated vector administrations, which are crucial to achieve and sustain a therapeutic response. Systemic delivery using eukaryotic viruses has faced challenges due to undesired uptake by the liver and reticulo-endothelial system, broad tropism for normal tissues, insertional mutagenesis and immunogenicity limiting repeated vector delivery. It is obvious that a successful systemic gene therapy will depend on the successful design of targeted delivery vectors able to express therapeutic genes in the tumor tissue following systemic administration while sparing the healthy tissues. The present Special Issue aims to introduce the potential of targeting gene therapy to cancer and the role of nucleic acid delivery technologies that could present a breakthrough in systemic gene therapy of cancer.
Dr. Amin Hajitou
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- gene therapy
- cancer
- metastasis
- systemic targeting
- vector development
- tumor angiogenesis
- viral vectors
- no-viral vectors
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