Safe and neuroprotective vectors for long-term traumatic brain injury gene therapy.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex and progressive brain injury with no approved treatments that needs both short- and long-term therapeutic strategies to cope with the variety of physiopathological mechanisms involved. In particular, neuroinflammation is a key process modulating TBI outcome, and the potentiation of these mechanisms by pro-inflammatory gene therapy vectors could contribute to the injury progression. Here, we evaluate in the controlled cortical impact model of TBI, the safety of integrative-deficient lentiviral vectors (IDLVs) or the non-viral HNRK recombinant modular protein/DNA nanovector.