The University of Geneva is offering this technology for licensing or for collaboration. The technology is a method to reversibly immortalize cell lines.

Development Phase : Preclinical

Patent Status :
EP Patent Application pending

This method has a broad range of application in the following areas:

therapeutic, cell therapy, gene therapy, transplant, vaccine, virus research tool, vector, genomics, proteomics, agricultural , tissue culture, transgenic, diseases: blood, cancer, dermatologic, immune, infectious, neurological

References :
Molecular Therapy 2: 1-11 (2000);

Science 272: 263-267 (1996)

Contact :

Dr. Laurent Miéville
tel: +41-22-705-7369
fax: +41-22-329-4290
Unitec
Office of Technology Transfer
University of Geneva
24 rue du General Dufour
Ch-1211 Geneva 4/Switzerland

e-mail: unitec@unige.ch

Immortalization of primary cells using lentivectors

The invention describes a method to immortalize primary cells conditionally using HIV-based vectors. Because primary cells fail to divide readily in culture, they are resistant to conventional gene therapy delivery systems; however, lentiviruses such as HIV are capable of transducing cells irrespective of their proliferative status. By removing the disease-causing elements of a lentivirus, the resulting lentiviral vector can be exploited safely to deliver, integrate, and induce the long term expression of transgenes into nondividing cells. In this invention, lentivectors are used to introduce immortalizing genes in primary cells. Continuously growing cell lines are thereby obtained, which can be expanded, cloned, extensively characterized not only in their immortalized state, but also after de-immortalization. The immortalization process is indeed reversible, allowing full differentiation to be restored after expansion.

Applications:

¨ Use of lentiviral vectors to immortalize primary cells.

¨ Creation of immortalized cell lines that can be de-immortalized and used in a broad range of applications (physiology, pharmacology, genomics, proteomics, production of specific proteins, cell transplantation, anti-tumoral and anti-infectious vaccines).

A number of human cell lines have already been obtained, that can be used in some of the above applications.