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Updated: Jul 13, 2026

Evaluation of the Efficacy And Toxicity of RNAs Targeting HIV-1 Production for Use in Gene or Drug Therapy
Published on: September 5, 2016
Inhibition of HIV replication: a powerful antiviral strategy by IFN-beta gene delivery in CD4+ cells
Fabienne Brule1, Emmanuel Khatissian, Alexandre Benani
1Laboratory of Virology & Immunology, University of Liège, B-4000 Liège, Belgium.
Abstract:
In this study, we demonstrated the efficiency and feasibility of a gene therapy protocol against HIV infection using the antiviral effects of IFN-beta expression. Lentiviral vectors containing the human or the simian IFN-beta sequences under the influence of the murine moderate H2-kb promoter were constructed. To examine the capacity of IFN-beta to inhibit the replication of HIV in human CD4(+) cells, a transduction protocol permitting to efficiently transduce CD4(+) cells or PBMC (85+/-12% of CD4(+)-transduced cells) with a moderate expression of IFN-beta was developed. Results indicate that enforced expression of IFN-beta has no negative effects in terms of apoptosis and proliferation. In human CD4(+) cells, it drastically inhibits (up to 99.9%) replication after challenging with different strains of HIV-1. The expression of exogenous IFN-beta leads to an amplification of the CD4(+) cells (11-fold) and to a drastic decrease of the p24 protein. Micro-array analyses indicated that antiviral effect of IFN-beta could be due to a major regulation of the inflammatory response. These results are encouraging for the development of a clinical study of gene therapy against AIDS using IFN-beta.
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