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Risto Ala-Aho
AMERICAN SOCIETY OF GENE THERAPY The 4th Annual Meeting of American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) was held in Seattle, Washington. More than one thousand researches gave presentations of their own field of gene therapy research as either oral presentations or poster sessions. I participated a meeting with an abstract titled "Adenoviral delivery of p53 gene suppresses expression of collagenase-3 (MMP-13) in squamous carcinoma cells" and presented it on the poster session "Approaches Using Programmed Cell Death in Cancer Gene Therapy". The poster dealt with using adenoviral gene delivery of tumor suppressor gene p53 into p53 deficient squamous carcinoma cell lines resulting in suppression of MMP-1 and MMP-13 gene expression. I was also a co-author of abstract # 815 by Joronen et al. The meeting days opened with educational programs or plenary sessions giving an extensive description of the gene therapy research today. The latest research results were presented in numerous of workshops and oral abstract sessions. The corporate symposia late in the evenings gave an interesting point of comparison between academic and commercial research. Relatively few posters dealt with the topic of my own research, gene therapy in extracellular matrix remodelling during a cancer cell invasion. Siller-López et al. had constructed a recombinant adenovirus coding human neutrophil collagenase (MMP-8) as a potential therapeutic agent in hepatic cirrhosis. AdMMP-8 injected rats underwent fibrosis reduction in liver and rearrangement of the hepatic parenchyma was also noted. In addition to my own work, adenovirus-mediated gene transfer of wild-type p53 gene was used in several other studies. George et al. showed a novel effect of wild-type p53 expression on vascular smooth muscle cell migration. P53 was able to inhibit SMC migration and induce apoptosis representing a candidate gene for gene therapy in coronary artery bypass grafting. Buttergeit et al. had used adenoviral delivery of wild-type p53 gene into p53 mutated B lymphoma cells. The cells transduced with wild-type p53 gene showed an inhibition of proliferation and an increase in apoptosis. The 4th annual meeting of ASGT was well organized though the meeting days were very long. In general, I considered the meeting very instructive and informative. I had a possibility to discuss the questions of my own research with other researches and got many new ideas during the poster sessions. It was motivating when people came to me and asked me to give advise to their own experiments. I thank the Finnish Gene Therapy Society for the financial support for attending the ASGT meeting in Seattle. Risto Ala-Aho |