Lentiviral FANCA Vectors Pseudotyped with a Modified Prototype Foamy Viral Envelope Corrects Murine Fanca−/− Hematopoietic Stem Cells with Reduced Toxicity.
Authors: Sun Zejin , Yang Yanzhu , Li Yan , Zeng Daisy , Li Jingling , Lindemann Dirk , Clapp D. Wade , Hanenberg Helmut 
Published: April 2020

Fanconi anemia (FA) is a recessive DNA repair disorder characterized by congenital abnormalities, bone marrow failure, genomic instability, and a predisposition to malignancies. As the majority of FA patients ultimately acquires severe bone marrow failure, transplantation of stem cells from a normal donor is the only curative treatment to replace the malfunctioning hematopoietic system. Stem cell gene transfer technology aimed at re-introducing the missing gene is a potentially promising therapy, however, prolonged ex vivo culture of cells, that was utilized in clinical trials with gammaretroviruses, results in a high incidence of apoptosis and at least in mice predisposes the surviving reinfused cells to hematological malignancy. Consequently, gene delivery systems such as lentiviruses that allow a reduction in ex vivo culture time are highly desirable. Here, we constructed a lentiviral vector expressing the human FANCA cDNA and tested the ability of this construct pseudotyped with either VSVG or a modified prototype foamyvirus (FV) envelope to correct Fanca−/− stem and progenitor cells in vitro and in vivo. In order to minimize genotoxic stress due to extended in vitro manipulations, an overnight transduction protocol was utilized where in the absence of prestimulation, murine Fanca−/− bone marrow cKit+ cells were co-cultured for 16h with FANCA lentivirus on the recombinant fibronectin fragment CH296. Transduction efficiency and transfer of lentivirally expressed FANCA was confirmed functionally in vitro by improved survival of consistently approximately 60% of clonogenic progenitors in serial concentrations of mitomycin C (MMC), irregardless of the envelope that was utilized to package the vector. Transduction of fibroblasts was also associated with complete correction of MMC-induced G2/M arrest and biochemically with the restoration of FancD2 mono-ubiquitination. Finally, to functionally determine whether gene delivery by the recombinant lentivirus during such a short transduction period is sufficient to correct Fanca−/− stem cell repopulation to wild-type levels, competitive repopulation experiments were conducted as previously described. Follow-up of up to 8 months demonstrated that the functional correction were also achieved in the hematopoietic stem cell compartment as evidenced by observations that the repopulating ability of Fanca−/− stem cells transduced with the recombinant lentivirus encoding hFANCA was equivalent to that of wild-type stem cells. Importantly, despite the fact that the gene transfer efficiency into cells surviving the transduction protocol were similar for both pseudotypes, VSVG was associated with a 4-fold higher toxicity to the c-kit+ cells than the FV envelope. Thus, when target cell numbers are limited as stem cells are in FA patients, the foamyviral envelope may facilitate overall greater survival of corrected stem cells. Collectively, these data indicate that the lentiviral construct can efficiently correct FA HSCs and progenitor cells in a short transduction protocol overnight without prestimulation and that the modified foamy envelope may have less cytotoxicity than the commonly used VSVG envelope.