Ann Thorac Surg 2002;73:1097
© 2002 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Invited commentary
Steven R. DeMeester, MDa
a Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, The University of Southern California, 1441 Eastlake Ave, Suite 7418, Los Angeles, CA 90033-0804, USA
e-mail: sdemeester{at}surgery.usc.edu
The promise and potential of gene therapy for a variety of congenital and acquired conditions continues to loom just over the horizon, in part because of problems with delivery mechanisms. The bronchial tree provides unique access for viral-mediated gene transfer to the lungs, and ischemia-reperfusion and chronic rejection/bronchiolitis obliterans remain significant clinical problems in lung transplantation that are potentially amenable to gene therapy. In this article Suga and colleagues report that the use of a standard clinical immunosuppression regimen significantly enhanced and prolonged adenovirus-mediated transgene expression in rat lungs. Further, the efficacy of re-transfection in the immunosuppressed animals was significantly increased compared to that observed in the control group of non-immunosuppressed rats. The authors nicely correlate the improved re-transfection rate with stable serum interferon-gamma and anti-adenoviral IgG levels in the immunosuppressed animals. While these enticing results must be interpreted with caution since rats are known to be exquisitely sensitive to immunosuppression, none-the-less the concepts are certainly intriguing and well presented.
