Effective tumor therapy with plasmid-encoded cytokines combined with in vivo electroporation.

Plasmids may have unique advantages as a gene delivery system. However, a major obstacle is the low in vivo transduction efficiency. In this study, an electroporation-based gene transduction approach was taken to study the effect of interleukin (IL)-2 or IL-12 gene transduction on the growth of experimental murine tumors. Significant intratumoral gene transduction was achieved by electroporation of tumors that had been injected with naked plasmids encoding reporter genes and cytokine genes (IL-2 and IL-12) under the control of a constitutive cytomegalovirus promoter. In addition, significant tumor growth delay could be achieved in a murine melanoma line B16.F10 with the cytokine genes. Most importantly, systemic transgene levels were negligible when compared with intratumoral adenovirus-mediated IL-12 gene delivery, which leads to significantly higher systemic cytokine levels. Therefore, naked plasmid- and in vivo electroporation-mediated cancer gene therapy may be therapeutically efficacious while maintaining low systemic toxicity.