Improved retinal transduction in vivo and photoreceptor-specific transgene expression using adenovirus vectors with...

Adenovirus (Ad) vectors can be injected into human ocular tissues without producing adverse events and are therefore a promising means of gene transfer to the retina. However, when administered subretinally, Ad vectors primarily transduce the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), whereas the majority of mutant gene products that cause photoreceptor (PR) degeneration are expressed exclusively in the PR cells. While it has been shown previously that pseudotyping of Ad can partially overcome the limited PR transduction by Ad5, we found that pseudotyping of Ad is not necessary for transduction of PR cells. We determined that, in the context of Ad, the cytomegalovirus (CMV) promoter is not significantly active in PRs. We compared expression levels from CMV and chicken beta actin (CBA) promoters in neural retina and found that CBA has a 173-fold greater potency than CMV. We also investigated the nature of the Ad-RPE interaction in murine retina and determined that the RGD domain in Ad penton plays a key role in RPE tropism. Deletion of the RGD domain coupled with use of the CBA promoter permitted transgene expression in neural retina approximately 667 times more efficiently than with Ad5 vectors. The use of these vectors in combination with a 4.7 kilobase (kb) rhodopsin promoter enabled transgene expression exclusively in PR cells in vivo.