Creating universality for cancer gene therapy in applying Adenovirus vectors with altered tropism; designing Adenovirus particles using K-Coil/E-Coil technology to control receptor specificity

Abstract

For my Master Thesis project I was charged with the design of two recombinant types of adenoviruses. The first adenovirus should possess a K-coil sequence situated in the HI-loop region of the fibre's knob domain, the other one was supposed to have an ablated CAR tropism in addition to the identical K-coil insertion. The virus' transduction efficiency via EGF-receptors was monitored by fluorescents provoked by a GFP marker, that had to be inserted into the E1 region of the AdV genome for this reason.