Gene therapy may offer a new tool for the treatment of bladder cancer. Previously, we have shown a significant antitumor effect in bladder cancer xenografts in a nude mouse model using intratumoral herpes simplex virus thymidine (HSV-TK) and endostatin gene monotherapy.

Given the high vascularity of human bladder cancer and the ability of HSV-TK or endostatin monotherapy to eradicate the tumors, we decided to test a novel combination of cytotoxic and antiangiogenic gene therapy using HSV-TK and endostatin adeno-associated viruses (AAV) in vitro.

We constructed the plasmid AAV-TK-IRES-Endostatin (pAAV-TIE) and packaged the AAV particles containing gene fragments of HSV-TK and endostatin. The combination anticancer effect of recombinant AAV-TIE (rAAV-TIE) was measured in vitro while rAAV-HSV-TK and rAAV-Endostatin were used as control groups.

The inverted terminal repeat sequences were amplified using only one primer and the fragment between two ITRs of pAAV-TIE measuring about 4 kb, which indicated a stable sequence of pAAV-TIE. Three clear bands representing the AAV capsid proteins VP1, VP2, and VP3 could be seen on both lanes against a very low background, which demonstrated that chloroform extraction could effectively extract contaminants from rAAV stock without significant loss of the rAAV. In vitro, our results found that the transduction efficiency, measured from GFP-transduced tumors, was about 62%. The combination therapy led to an obvious apoptosis of bladder tumor cells compared with single HSV-TK or endostatin treatment.

We concluded that the inhibition of angiogenesis using endostatin gene transfer, together with the cytotoxic HSV-TK gene therapy, resulted in a significant antitumor effect in vitro compared to the single gene based therapy in BTCC.