iBB

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a debilitating condition characterized by the blockage of arteries, which leads to limb amputation in more severe cases. Researchers from SCERG- and BERG-iBB propose the use of human bone marrow (BM) MSC transiently transfected with minicircles encoding for VEGF as an ex vivo gene therapy strategy to enhance angiogenesis in PAD patients. The data shows that VEGF overexpression improved the angiogenic potential of MSC in vitro, as confirmed by endothelial cell tube formation and cell migration assays.These results suggest that minicircle-mediated VEGF gene delivery, combined with the unique properties of human MSC, could represent a promising ex vivo gene therapy approach to improve angiogenesis in the context of PAD. The work was published in Human Gene Therapy.