Measles virus glycoprotein-pseudotyped lentiviral vectors are highly superior to vesicular stomatitis virus G pseudotypes for genetic modification of monocyte-derived dendritic cells.

Dendritic cells (DCs) are potent antigen-presenting cells capable of promoting or regulating innate and adaptive immune responses against non-self antigens. To better understand the DC biology or to use them for immune intervention, a tremendous effort has been made to improve gene transfer in these cells. Lentiviral vectors (LVs) have conferred a huge advantage in that they can transduce nondividing cells such as human monocyte-derived DCs (MDDCs) but required high amounts of viral particles and/or accessory proteins such as Vpx or Vpr to achieve sufficient transduction rates. As a consequence, these LVs have been shown to cause dramatic functional modifications, such as the activation or maturation of transduced MDDCs. Taking advantage of new pseudotyped LVs, i.e., with envelope glycoproteins from the measles virus (MV), we demonstrate that MDDCs are transduced very efficiently with these new LVs compared to the classically used vesicular stomatitis virus G-pseudotyped LVs and thus allowed to achieve high transduction rates at relatively low multiplicities of infection. Moreover, in this experimental setting, no activation or maturation markers were upregulated, while MV-LV-transduced cells remained able to mature after an appropriate Toll-like receptor stimulation. We then demonstrate that our MV-pseudotyped LVs use DC-SIGN, CD46, and CD150/SLAM as receptors to transduce MDDCs. Altogether, our results show that MV-pseudotyped LVs provide the most accurate and simple viral method for efficiently transferring genes into MDDCs without affecting their activation and/or maturation status.