Hepatitis C represents a rapidly evolving worldwide virus plague. Hepatitis C virus (HCV), a small positive-sense RNA virus of the Flaviviridae family, is the major cause of hepatitis in the United States and often leads to chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Progress in our understanding of the virus and the development of effective treatment modalities have been hampered by lack of a reliable in vitro system for propagating HCV and of a convenient animal. Recently, we developed two long-term cell culture systems of HCV by transfection with infectious HCV RNA transcripts producing high levels of HCV. The viral protease NS3 cleaves the non-structural proteins of HCV and appears to be essential for HCV replication and packaging. Therefore, we generated several adenovirus constructs with the single.chain antibody (sFv) gene derived from human monoclonal antibody to the NS3' protease of HCV. We demonstrated that the anti-NS3/sFv are stably expressed in mammalian cells after adenovirus-mediated gene transfer and that the appropriate antibodies are produced and bind to NS3. It is our hypothesis that the transfected cell lines support HCV replication and virion formation in vitro comparable to in vivo infection and that intracellular sFv to the NS3 protease interferes with HCV propagation and/or packaging in vitro and in vivo. Accordingly, the specific aims of this proposal are: 1) to compare the production of genomic and replicative HCV RNA sequences and proteins in the transfected cell lines with that in infected human liver and HCC by quantitative assays; 2) to define the functional role of the conserved terminal 5' and 3' UTR elements in HCV replication and packaging; and 3) to determine whether sFv to NS3 protease will interfere with the NS3 functions, HCV replication, packaging and/or infectivity. The recent generation of HCV transgenic mice in our laboratory will allow in vivo testing of the anti-NS3/sFv. The attainment of these aims will provide insight into the mechanism of HCV replication and virion formation and will lead to the development of new treatment strategies against this significant human pathogen.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
2R01CA054576-04A1
Application #
2411466
Study Section
Metabolic Pathology Study Section (MEP)
Project Start
1997-07-15
Project End
2001-06-30
Budget Start
1997-07-15
Budget End
1998-06-30
Support Year
4
Fiscal Year
1997
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Tulane University
Department
Internal Medicine/Medicine
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
City
New Orleans
State
LA
Country
United States
Zip Code
70118
Bao, Lili; Chandra, Partha K; Moroz, Krzysztof et al. (2014) Impaired autophagy response in human hepatocellular carcinoma. Exp Mol Pathol 96:149-54
Gunduz, Feyza; Mallikarjun, Chaithanya; Balart, Luis A et al. (2014) Interferon alpha induced intrahepatic pSTAT1 inversely correlate with serum HCV RNA levels in chronic HCV infection. Exp Mol Pathol 96:36-41
Dash, Srikanta; Prabhu, Ramesh; Hazari, Sidhartha et al. (2005) Interferons alpha, beta, gamma each inhibit hepatitis C virus replication at the level of internal ribosome entry site-mediated translation. Liver Int 25:580-94
Dash, Srikanta; Haque, Salima; Joshi, Virendra et al. (2005) HCV-hepatocellular carcinoma: new findings and hope for effective treatment. Microsc Res Tech 68:130-48
Garry, Courtney E; Garry, Robert F (2004) Proteomics computational analyses suggest that the carboxyl terminal glycoproteins of Bunyaviruses are class II viral fusion protein (beta-penetrenes). Theor Biol Med Model 1:10
Prabhu, Ramesh; Khalap, Nutan; Burioni, Roberto et al. (2004) Inhibition of hepatitis C virus nonstructural protein, helicase activity, and viral replication by a recombinant human antibody clone. Am J Pathol 165:1163-73
Prabhu, Ramesh; Joshi, Virendra; Garry, Robert F et al. (2004) Interferon alpha-2b inhibits negative-strand RNA and protein expression from full-length HCV1a infectious clone. Exp Mol Pathol 76:242-52
Garry, Robert F; Dash, Srikanta (2003) Proteomics computational analyses suggest that hepatitis C virus E1 and pestivirus E2 envelope glycoproteins are truncated class II fusion proteins. Virology 307:255-65
Akhter, Shamim; Liu, Huifeng; Prabhu, Ramesh et al. (2003) Epstein-Barr virus and human hepatocellular carcinoma. Cancer Lett 192:49-57
Qi, Z T; Kalkeri, G; Hanible, J et al. (2003) Stem-loop structures II-IV of the 5' untranslated sequences are required for the expression of the full-length hepatitis C virus genome. Arch Virol 148:449-67

Showing the most recent 10 out of 40 publications