The last intron of the human thrombopoietin gene enhances expression in milk of transgenic mice

Non-viral therapeutic approaches to ocular diseases: An overview and future directions

Currently there are no viable treatment options for patients with debilitating inherited retinal degeneration. The vast variability in disease-inducing mutations and resulting phenotypes has hampered the development of therapeutic interventions. Gene therapy is a logical approach, and recent work has focused on ways to optimize vector design and packaging to promote optimized expression and phenotypic rescue after intraocular delivery. In this review, we discuss ongoing ocular clinical trials, which currently use viral gene delivery, but focus primarily on new advancements in optimizing the efficacy of non-viral gene delivery for ocular diseases. Non-viral delivery systems are highly customizable, allowing functionalization to improve cellular and nuclear uptake, bypassing cellular degradative machinery, and improving gene expression in the nucleus. Non-viral vectors often yield transgene expression levels lower than viral counterparts, however their favorable safety/immune profiles and large DNA capacity (critical for the delivery of large ocular disease genes) make their further development a research priority. Recent work on particle coating and vector engineering presents exciting ways to overcome limitations of transient/low gene expression levels, but also highlights the fact that further refinements are needed before use in the clinic.

Intron V, not intron I of human thrombopoietin, improves expression in the milk of transgenic mice regulated by goat beta-casein promoter

Introns near 5′ end of genes generally enhance gene expression because of an enhancer /a promoter within their sequence or as intron-mediated enhancement. Surprisingly, our previous experiments found that the vector containing the last intron (intron V) of human thromobopoietin (hTPO) expressed higher hTPO in cos-1 cell than the vector containing intron I regulated by cytomegalovirus promoter. Moreover, regulated by 1.0 kb rat whey acidic protein promoter, hTPO expression was higher in transgenic mice generated by intron V-TPOcDNA than in transgenic mice generated by TPOcDNA and TPOgDNA. However, it is unknown whether the enhancement of hTPO expression by intron I is decreased by uAUG7 at 5′-UTR of hTPO in vivo. Currently, we constructed vectors regulated by stronger 6.5kb β-casein promoter, including pTPOGA (containing TPOcDNA), pTPOGB (containing TUR-TPOcDNA, TUR including exon1, intron I and non-coding exon2 of hTPO gene), pTPOGC (containing ΔTUR-TPOcDNA, nucleotides of TUR from uAUG7 to physiological AUG were deleted), pTPOGD (containing intron V-TPOcDNA) and pTPOGE (containing TPOgDNA), to evaluate the effect of intron I on hTPO expression and to further verify whether intron V enhances hTPO expression in the milk of transgenic mice. The results demonstrated that intron V, not intron I improved hTPO expression.