American Society of Gene Therapy - 8th Annual Meeting

Travel reports: Petri Mäkinen, Tiina Wahlfors, Tuuli Ranki

Petri Mäkinen

Department of Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine

A.I.Virtanen Institute

University of Kuopio

The 8th Annual Meeting of American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) was held at St. Louis, Missouri. The program started by educational sessions, and continued with workshops, oral abstract sessions, poster sessions, scientific symposia and meet-the-investigator lunches. The topics of the meeting covered RNA interference, stem cell therapies, applications and optimization of viral mediated gene transfer, non-viral gene transfer, immune responses, gene regulation and therapeutic applications for various diseases, such as cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular diseases and neurological disorders. There were total 1135 abstracts accepted to the meeting.

My own special interests for the meeting were RNA interference and lentiviral vectors. Delightedly, many of the oral presentations and posters dealt with those subjects and gave me ideas for the future. Especially, I found the lecture by T. Tuschl about siRNA- and miRNA- guided gene regulation in mammals and the educational session about RNA interference to be very interesting and motivating. I participated in the meeting with the poster entitled “Stable Lentivirus-mediated RNA interference: Comparison of U6 and H1 Promoters in Endothelial Cells and GFP Knockdown in Mouse Brain”. People that were interested in my poster asked both easy and tough questions about my work and we shared some interesting conversations concerning the future of different RNAi-systems.

Overall, the meeting was a good opportunity to learn the latest progress in the gene therapy field and RNAi technology. The journey also served as a refreshing change for the routine work in the lab.  I would like to thank the Finnish society of Gene Therapy for financial support for the meeting.

Petri Mäkinen

Tiina Wahlfors

A.I.Virtanen Institute for molecular sciences

University of Kuopio

The 8th Annual Meeting for American Society of Gene Therapy in this year took place in St. Louis, Missouri. The program started with educational session in the 1st of June. There were several nice and informative lectures covering the basic ideas about gene therapy. Next four days included 16 scientific symposia, 17 workshops and oral/poster sessions from submitted abstracts. Some of the main topics in this meeting were: cancer vaccines, stem cell gene therapy, pre-clinical issues in gene therapy and ethical issues in clinical trial design. There were also many sessions dealing with the latest vector design and vector/transgene toxicity.

My own interest is in suicide gene therapy with cancer using HSV-TK. I had a poster presentation in first poster session which was named cancer-apoptosis and suicide. My topic was "In vivo enhancement of HSV-TK/GCV cancer gene therapy with polyamine biosynthesis inhibition". In the same poster session there were a lot of interesting posters and I got some new ideas. Other oral/poster sessions were loaded with enormous amount of profound and useful information. It is always nice to meet people working in same area and have scientific conversations through the week.

I want to thank Finnish Society of Gene therapy and University of Kuopio for grants.

Tuuli Ranki

Cancer Gene Therapy Group

Rational Drug Design Program

University of Helsinki

The 8th annual meeting of American Society of Gene Therapy was held in the beginning of June in St. Louis, Missouri. Over 1100 abstracts were submitted covering a wide selection of topics ranging from viral gene therapy to non-viral approaches, stem cell technologies and immunology of gene therapy, just to name a few. The meeting included educational sessions, workshops, meet-the-investigator lunches, oral abstract sessions, scientific symposia and poster sessions, so the selection of interesting events was almost overwhelming.

My main interests were adenoviral gene therapy approaches, both engineering of replication selective viruses and methods to improve gene transfer by capsid modifications and avoiding immune responses to vectors. In the context of viral vector approaches immunology was very well covered and especially different approaches in Kupffer cell depletion and complement inhibition strategies were interesting. In my opinion abstracts about Kupffer cell scavenger receptor and different blood factors such as C4-binding protein in the context of blood clearance and liver transduction of adenovirus were intriguing.

This ASGT meeting was my second international meeting, and for a young scientist like me it offered a lot of bewildering information and served as an enthusiasm booster for my own studies. I can sincerely recommend attending these meetings to everyone in this field of science! I would like to thank the Finnish Society of Gene Therapy for this opportunity to participate in this great meeting.

Tuuli Ranki