ABSTRACT
The majority of effort to date in lung gene transfer has centered on the problem of delivery of genes via the airway. Diseases such as pulmonary hypertension, persistent pulmonary hypertension of the neonate, chronic thromboembolic disease, and vasculitis could be targets for pulmonary vascular gene therapy. Implantation of transduced cells has the advantage of ability to use retroviral vectors, which are too inefficient in nonreplicating cells to be useful for in vivo vascular gene transfer but which allow incorporation of transgene into the host cell genome and thus stable transfection. In rabbits given intratracheal complexes, expression was seen in both airway and alveolar epithelial cells and alveolar macrophages, with no expression seen in the pulmonary vasculature. The search for improved liposome vectors for systemic gene delivery has been vigorous.
