Lentiviral Vector Design for Stem Cell Research
Human stem cells offer a valuable source for potential cell therapy and a powerful tool for basic research. To date, Lentiviral vectors (LVs) have been the most widely used delivery vehicle for stem cells due to its high efficiency of both transduction and stable integration. As a world leader in stem cell research and LVs design, Creative Biolabs provides the most comprehensive stem cell and LVs-related service, as well as technology for every stage of your stem cell research. Our LVs design service platform uses the latest and most optimized protocols to achieve efficient and successful projects.
LVs for Stem Cell Research
Stem cells, such as embryonic stem (ES) cells, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), can give rise to many different cell lineages, potentially opening up new therapeutic avenues. Many studies have demonstrated that gene delivery to these stem cells is useful for basic research, such as basic biology, drug discovery, transplantation and regenerative medicine. To obtain efficient and stable transgene expression, several gene delivery systems using viral vectors have been used for stem cell research, such as adenoviral vectors, adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors and LVs. Among them, LVs is considered to be the most promising strategy for stem cell gene delivery to date. LVs offers the following advantages over other vectors: 1) they have much higher transduction efficiency; 2) the transgenes are permanently integrated into the host genome to make the gene expression stable and inheritable; 3) less vector-associated immunogenicity is observed for LVs-mediated transduction compared to other viral vectors.
Application of LVs for Stem Cell
Stem cells provide powerful tools for basic research and valuable resources for potential cell therapy. The potential of these cell lines can be further enhanced by genetic modification. In recent years, LVs have been increasingly used for genetic modification of human ES cells, iPS cells and HSCs, expanding the application of these stem cells in the field of basic research and cell therapy.
- iPS cells: the genetic modification of patient-specific iPS cells by LVs facilitates the study of pathological mechanisms and provides new therapeutic approaches in personalized medicine.
- ES cells: the ability of LVs to efficiently introduce active transgenes into human ES cells promotes gain-of-function studies of early developmental processes in the human system. This has important implications for the use of gene-modified human ES cells in transplantation and tissue regeneration applications.
- HSCs: the stable introduction of genes into HSCs via LVs holds the promise of curing congenital gene deficiencies and might provide potential therapies for human immunodeficiency virus infection and cancer.
Service
Among the available gene transfer vectors, LVs best meet the requirements for stem cell transduction. LVs integrate into the genome of target cells and enable stable expression and delivery of the transgene to the cell progeny. Furthermore, the type of promoter in LV greatly affects the transcriptional activity of the transgene in stem cells. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of the promoter when selecting LVs to transfer the target gene into stem cells. For example, the EF1α promoter promotes robust transgene expression in ES cells from undifferentiated status to fully differentiated status during neuronal differentiation, whereas the CMV promoter activates transgene expression only in the late stages of differentiation. Creative Biolabs provides the most comprehensive selection of LVs design for stem cell research with choices of different promoters, including, EF1α, PGK, UBC, CMV. For stable expression of the gene, the EF1α promoter offers the highest percentage of cells expressing transgene, followed by PGK and UBC. For transient gene expression, CMV promoter is a good choice for higher levels of transgene expression.
In addition to select promoters described above, regulated control of gene expression has great significance for stem cell research because it avoids the adverse effects of transgene expression after cell differentiation. To this end, scientists at Creative Biolabs have developed a variety of LVs design platforms for stem cell research that can control transgene expression in ES cells, iPS cells and other stem cells to explore transgenic functions in a spatiotemporal manner.
Accelerating your research and discoveries by leveraging our extensive expertise in stem cell and LVs design technology. Creative Biolabs offers a comprehensive service for every aspect of stem cell-based research and additional stem cell/lentivirus support to our clients through a variety of custom services. To inquire about these services or to request a quote, please feel free to contact us.
