Antitumor activity of recombinant adenoviral vectors expressing murine IFN-α in mice injected with metastatic IFN-resistant tumor cells

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that gene therapy with type I interferon (IFN) in an adenovirus vector is a powerful tool to suppress the growth of human tumors transplanted in immune-deficient mice. However, in these studies the host immune-mediated effects, which may be important in mediating the long-term control of tumor growth by these cytokines, was not studied. In this paper, we evaluate the antitumor efficacy of different adenoviral vectors containing mouse IFN-α genes (i.e., a first-generation replication-defective vector containing IFN-α1 and two different second-generation vectors containing IFN-α2) in immunocompetent DBA/2 mice transplanted with highly metastatic Friend leukemic cells resistant in vitro to type I IFN. We found that injection of all the different adenovirus vectors containing mouse IFN-α genes resulted in a marked antitumor response in mice transplanted either subcutaneously or intravenously with IFN-resistant Friend leukemic cells compared to tumor-bearing animals inoculated with a control vector. Tumor growth inhibition after injection of IFN–adenovirus vectors was associated with a prolonged presence of high IFN levels in the sera of the injected mice. Suppression of metastatic tumor growth was also observed after a single injection of the IFN–adenovirus recombinant vectors, whereas a comparable antitumor response generally required several injections of high doses of IFN. Altogether, these results demonstrate that IFN–adenoviral vectors can efficiently inhibit metastatic tumor growth by host-mediated mechanisms and suggest that adenovirus-mediated IFN-α gene therapy may represent an attractive alternative to the conventional clinical use of this cytokine, which generally requires multiple injections of high IFN doses for a prolonged period of time. Cancer Gene Therapy (2001) 8, 63–72