Publications by authors named "Serena Fawaz"

HIV-1 based lentiviral viruses are considered powerful and versatile gene therapy vectors to deliver therapeutic genes to patients with hereditary or acquired diseases. These vectors can efficiently transduce a variety of cell types when dividing or non-dividing to provide permanent delivery and long-term gene expression. Demand for scalable manufacturing protocols able to generate enough high titre vector for widespread use of this technology is increasing and considerable efforts to improve vector production cost-effectively, is ongoing.

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Article Synopsis
  • Lentiviral vectors (LV) are promising tools for gene therapy, but can lead to insertional mutagenesis, making it crucial to study their integration into host genomes.
  • The research focuses on how transcription factors (TF) may influence the process of LV integration by mapping predicted binding sites near the insertion points chosen by HIV-1 LV in human induced pluripotent stem cells and their derivatives.
  • Findings indicate that specific transcription factor binding sites (pTFBS) are enriched in the LV insertion sites and are essential for the HIV-1 life cycle, suggesting their importance in viral survival and propagation.
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