Adeno-Associated Viruses Serotype 2-Mediated RNA Interference Efficiently Inhibits Rabies Virus Replication In Vitro and In Vivo

WU, Hong-Xia; WANG, Hua-Lei; GUO, Xiao-Feng; YANG, Yu-Jiao; MA, Jin-Zhu; WANG, Tie-Cheng; GAO, Yu-Wei; ZHAO, Yong-Kun; YANG, Song-Tao; XIA, Xian-Zhu

Viral vectors are one of the major vehicles used by scientists in gene therapy to get their sequences expressed in the proper host. Viral vectors, including adenovirus, retrovirus, lentivirus and adeno-associated virus (AAV), are undoubtedly efficient tools for gene delivery. They have been widely used in delivering various genes and siRNAs. More recently, Gupta et al. and Sonwane et al. reported that an adenoviral vector-mediated delivery of small hairpin (sh)RNAs targeting the RAbV N or polymerase (L) mRNA led to a slight increase in survival of RAbV-infected mice [7, 16, 20] . So far, no research group has reported whether AAV can work as an siRNA delivery tool and transport a siRNA targeting RAbV into the cells or host to inhibit the RAbV replication.