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Tanja Hakkarainen
The Fifth Annual Meeting of the ASGT, June 5-9, 2002, Boston, MA After exhausting flight I finally arrived to Boston. The next challenge was to get to the hotel by cab. And I mean challenge, because the cab driver had the strangest accent I’ve ever heard (and he almost collide with another car on the way). But it’s funny to realise that you are able to have fluent small talk even though you don’t have a slightest idea what the other person is saying... The first day of the meeting was dedicated to educational sessions. The idea was that you could get the basic information about fields you are unfamiliar with e.g. different viral vectors, gene transfer to organs and stem cells. I think it was a good idea and made it more easier to fallow the presentations in the meeting. After those sessions I spend the rest of the evening reading the abstract book containing 1374 abstracts. So it wasn’t easy to pick up the most interesting ones; there were just too many of them. The next day started with simultaneous workshops. There was a great variety of topics: gene correction in genetic diseases, use of viral vectors in neural disorders, gene transfer for cardiovascular disease, designing clinical trials in gene therapy etc. So for sure something for everyone. I chose the Ethic-workshop, but it unfortunately turned out that the title was far more interesting than the session itself. It was a shame because ethic is an important aspect in the field of gene therapy. After workshops were the first oral presentations and poster session. The rest of the meeting days started with scientific symposiums followed by oral and poster presentations. One of the most interesting symposia was the "Cancer – oncolytic vector and replicative systems". Because my Ph.D-studies are related to adenoviruses I naturally followed the presentations concerning modified adenoviruses and especially conditionally replicative adenoviruses, CRAds. Oral presentation "Heparan sulfate proteoglycans and not CAR or integrins are the major receptors for hepatic adenoviral transduction in vivo" raised lot of questions. It is well established that only CAR and integrins are involved in adenoviral transduction. But the results were quite convincing so I’m waiting for more data with great interest. One hot topic of the meeting was CRAds where E1 region is under tissue spesific promoter ("A conditionally replicative adenovirus driven by the human telomerase promoter provides broad-spectrum anti-tumor activity"). It is important to make CRAds safer by limiting the replication to cancer cells only and the use of tissue specific promoters seems to be quite promising approach for that. There is also a need for better in vitro models for CRAds. One solution might be so called spheroids, cell clusters formed from cultured or primary tumor cells, which can be used as 3D in vitro models ("Primary tumor cell spheroids provide a three dimensional model for quantifying viral replication and oncolysis"). There was also one nice poster about "Development of internally labeled adenovirus with EGFP for imaging". It is well known that imaging of viruses with the help of reporter genes is inaccurate: you can see where the transgene is expressed but you can’t see where the virus itself is. In mentioned study, one of the viral structural proteins was fused with EGFP in order to get a fluorescent virus. Excellent idea, but unfortunately this modification interfered with virus packaging which unabled the rescuing of the virus So big international meetings, like ASGT, are hard work. But you always get new ideas, see what people are doing in the other labs and get more and more experiences about meetings, because it takes meeting or two befor you realised how the system goes and how you can get the best out of it. And as a top of the cake, I saw all my frinds and working mates from the UAB (I was working at the UAB as a visitor scientist for several months in 2001). Tanja Hakkarainen |