Deletion of the intracellular domain of coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR) enhances the expression of itself and boosts the efficiency of current adenovirus-mediated gene therapy in ovarian cancer cell lines in vitro

The failure of adenovirus-mediated gene therapy often derives from the absence of coxsackie and adenovirus receptor (CAR) expression in target cells. We hypothesize that the slight up-regulation of CAR expression might boost the effect of adenovirus-mediated gene therapy in ovarian cancer. To test this hypothesis, we transfected full-length and intracellular-domain-deleted (tailless) CAR plasmids into CAR-deficient ovarian cancer cell line SKOV3. We observed significant elevations of the in vitro killing effect of Adv-TK and oncolytic adenovirus-mediated cytopathic effect (CPE) in transfected sub-clones, and tailless-transfected SKOV3 showed higher CAR expressions than full-length CAR-transfected cells. We conclude that the extracellular domain of CAR is essential for adenovirus-based gene therapy and, furthermore, that its intracellular domain might play an important role in the regulation of its own expression. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.